Allen Brown West

Background

Allen Brown West was born at Reedsburg, Wis. , the oldest of four children of Allen Burdick West, a high school teacher of mathematics, and Esther (Brown) W.

Education

After graduating from Lake Mills High School, he received his B. A. (1907) at Milton College, Milton, Wis. , and then went as a Rhodes Scholar to Oriel College, Oxford, where, from 1907 to 1909 and again in 1910-11, he studied Greek history and epigraphy under Marcus Niebuhr Tod. He took his M. A. at the University of Wisconsin (1910) and his Ph. D. in 1912. His dissertation, The History of the Chalcidic League, remains the standard authority on a complex subject.

Career

West immediately undertook an instructorship at Swarthmore College (1912 - 16). After a series of briefer appointments at Racine College, the University of Rochester, Wheaton College, and Princeton, he accepted in 1927 a professorship in classics (after 1929 in classics and ancient history) at the University of Cincinnati, where he remained until his death. He was instantly killed when his car overturned near Stafford Springs, Connecticut, while he and his wife were returning from their summer home in Maine. A memorial service was held in Cincinnati; the remains were returned to Reedsburg. Although West's scholarship was broad, as his publications show, his particular interest lay in the history of imperial Athens. His conviction was that historical reconstruction must always be based upon the primary documents and a sound chronology. In the case of fifth-century Athens the primary documents (upon which the chronology often rests) are the inscriptions, and at the beginning of West's career these were in chaotic condition. He thus became epigraphist in order to be historian. In 1923 he began an extraordinarily fruitful collaboration with Benjamin Dean Meritt in the study of the tribute-quota lists and the financial records of the Athenian Empire. The work was stimulated in 1925-26 when West, as John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow, spent a year with his partner in Greece, where they tested their theories and commenced what may justly be called a revolution in Greek epigraphic scholarship. During the next decade over fifty articles came from this fertile partnership. In 1931 they published the first intelligible edition of the quota-lists; in 1934 there appeared The Athenian Assessment of 425 b. c. , a model of epigraphic editing and a preliminary to the planned full-scale edition of the tribute-records. The project was carried forward after West's tragic death, and the first volume of The Athenian Tribute Lists (1939) was dedicated to him.

Achievements

• He was known among his intimates as a classical scholar of vast learning and extreme modesty, and though his achievement was as a Hellenist, he kept the claims of Greece and Rome nicely balanced. His students have placed him among the "great" teachers and have kept viable his definition of scholarship: "an infinite capacity for taking pains. "

Personality

West was a cheerful, active figure of about 200 pounds, slightly under six feet tall. To his graduate students, in many an informal session, he transmitted his endless patience, his curiosity, his insistence upon seeking all the evidence, his habit of seeing a civilization comprehensively.

Connections

In 1914 he married Marion Grace Peabody of Madison, Wis. , by whom he had two children, Arthur Peabody and Agnes Elizabeth.

Father:

Allen Burdick West

A high school teacher of mathematics

Mother:

Esther (Brown) West

Spouse:

Marion Grace Peabody

child:

Arthur Peabody

child:

Agnes Elizabeth