Clarksville, TN – For more than 30 years, the esteemed, Harvard-educated classics professor Dr. Stephen V. Tracy toiled away in his office at Ohio State University, examining thousands of ancient Greek letters engraved in stone.
Tracy was an epigraphist, someone who studies inscriptions, and he was particularly interested in the minute differences found in Greek letters engraved thousands of years ago in Athens and other Greek city-states.
“He got it into his head that people have handwriting, whether you’re writing on paper or you’re writing on rocks,” Dr. Timothy Winters, a classics professor at Austin Peay State University, said. “He spent his entire life developing this system and in the end, he won credibility. He determined a method by which one could identify individual engravers.”
In the early 1980s, while pursing his Ph.D. at Ohio State, Winters studied under Tracy. This well regarded professor served as his dissertation adviser, and Winters watched his mentor conduct painstaking research that would revolutionize epigraphy for years to come.
“He found little serifs here and there that were distinctive,” Winters said. “So then, even if you get just a tiny little piece, you can come to this dossier he created and read through this thing and see how this particular engraver cuts letters. With that information, you can date an inscription. Even if it’s just a little fragment, you can put a date to that. It’s incredible what this did.”
Tracy has since retired from Ohio State, but Winters is leading an effort to honor his former professor by co-editing a new book, “Studies in Greek Epigraphy and History in Honor of Stephen V. Tracy.” The book is also edited by two of Tracy’s colleagues, Dr. Frank Ryan and Dr. Greg Reger.
The book is made up of about 30 scholarly essays by Tracy’s former students and fellow professors. Winters penned the introduction and a short essay on Tracy’s teaching style. He also contributed his own scholarly research to the book.
“The article I wrote deals with the date of a particular inscription in the National Museum in Athens,” Winters said. “There was a 40-year spread in which scholars had dated it. That’s a big spread. I wondered ‘can we not get any closer than that?’ So I started using (Tracy’s) method, narrowing it down. And the results are in the book.”
The book was published in August, and it marks the second major scholarly work that Winters has had published this year. The other book is a second-year reader on Homer’s “The Iliad,” which will be used by high school and college students to gain proficiency in moving from simple grammar to reading a text written in ancient Greek. The book, “Homer: A Transitional Reader,” consists of 15 passages from “The Iliad,” along with pre-reading materials, grammatical and comprehension exercises, vocabulary and grammar notes.
Winters and his colleague, John O’Neil, spent years analyzing “The Iliad,” looking for contractions and other idioms in Homer’s language that might throw off an inexperienced reader. He then used different type fonts to fill in these gaps, giving the reader the original text and a modified text to help them understand the nuances of ancient Greek.
“It took an enormous amount of effort to get that done,” he said.
For more information on Winters’ books, or on classical studies at APSU, contact the University’s Department of Language and Literature at 931-221-7891.
