Peter M. Fraser

Peter Marshall Fraser (born April 6, 1918 in Carshalton , Surrey ; died September 15, 2007 in Oxford ) was a British ancient historian , epigraphist and director of the British School at Athens from 1968 to 1971 .

Life

Peter M. Fraser was the son of Archibald Fraser and his wife Lily Louise, nee Sydenham. He grew up in Carshalton, a suburb of London , and attended the City of London School. Subsequently, he studied from 1937 Literae Humaniores as part of study of classical studies at Brasenose College of the University of Oxford , however, his studies had to because of military service in World War II interrupted the 1940th He served with the Seaforth Highlanders , after officer training with the rank of second lieutenant . He was first used in North Africa and wounded in the second battle of El Alamein . While in hospital, he was asked if he would serve as a liaison officer for the Special Operations Executive in Greece, and agreed. In 1943 he was deposed as a paratrooper near Kalamata in the Peloponnese and between 1943 and 1945 he was involved in the liberation of Greece occupied by the Axis powers . In 1944 he carried out a successful attack on a German airfield near Argos . In 1945 he was awarded the Military Cross for his bravery during the war .

Scientific career

During the war, Fraser was awarded the degree of MA in his absence in 1943 . After the war he resumed his studies at Oxford - now with Hugh Last - and, inspired by a brief but formative encounter with William Woodthorpe Tarn before the war, specialized in the Hellenistic period . In 1948 he became a lecturer in the history of Hellenism at the University of Oxford, a position that was specially set up for Fraser after he had already worked as a lecturer at Balliol College from 1947 to 1948 . In 1950 he won the prestigious Conington Prize of the university for his dissertation on Hellenistic Rhodes , Studies in the History and Epigraphy of Hellenistic Rhodes . For this, however, he refrained from getting a doctorate with the thesis , although his reviewer Arnold Hugh Martin Jones certified the thesis that it could be published without changes.

In 1954, Fraser became a fellow at the prestigious All Souls College , Oxford. The British Academy selected him as a member in 1960. In 1964, Fraser became a history reader of Hellenism and taught until his retirement in 1985. From 1985 to 1987 he served the college as Warden , as the college director. In 1995 he was appointed Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College.

During his time as professor at Oxford, he succeeded AHS Megaws from 1968 to 1971 as director of the British School at Athens. In 1973 he was a visiting professor at Indiana University Bloomington in Bloomington , Indiana .

Research and honors

The focus of Fraser's scientific work, for whom university teaching did not give too much pleasure, was the history of Hellenism, for which he mainly developed epigraphic evidence, but also conducted field research. His first book was the 1953 revision of Michael Rostovtzeff's Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World. A year later he published his Rhodian Peraea and Islands, which contained parts of his "dissertation". In 1960 he published the Inscriptions of Samothrace for the excavations carried out by the Institute of Fine Arts New York . The work received a scathing review from Louis Robert in the 1963 Gnomon , in which Fraser was accused of merely being interested in the history of events, despite the fact that the material was so productive for social history. The criticism did not go unheard.

From 1972 to 1982 he was instrumental in directing the British Society for Afghan Studies , for which he directed excavations in Kandahar , a founding of Alexander the Great , in southern Afghanistan . Fraser was also the editor of Afghan Studies , published only three times , which merged into South Asian Studies after 1982 . The most important work initiated by him in 1972, however, was the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names , which serves to develop the social and political history of Greece from archaic to Byzantine times and is initially supervised by the British Academy and since 1996 by the University of Oxford. The first of the seven volumes so far appeared in 1987. Here Fraser caught up with what Robert had accused him of in 1963: the failure to utilize the name certificates for the social history of the Greeks.

He was honored with honorary doctorates from the University of Trier in 1984, La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia in 1996 and the University of Athens in 2002 for his achievements .

Peter M. Fraser was buried in the British military cemetery on Kefalonia .

Publications (selection)

• with Tullia Rönne: Boeotian and West Greek Tombstones. Gleerup, Lund 1957.
• with George Ewart Bean : The Rhodian Peraea and Islands. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1954.
• Samothrace. Excavations Conducted by the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University. Volume 2, Part 1: The Inscriptions on Stone. Pantheon Books, New York 1960.
• Ptolemaic Alexandria. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1972.
• Rhodian Funerary Monuments. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1977.
• as editor: Lexicon of Greek Personal Names. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1987-2013.
• Cities of Alexander the Great. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1996.
• posthumous: Greek Ethnic Terminology. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2009.

literature

• Simon Hornblower: Peter Fraser MA, MC, FBA (1918-2007). In: The Annual of the British School at Athens . Volume 103, 2008, pp. 1-7.
• Simon Hornblower: Peter Marshall Fraser 1918-2007. In: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy. Volume 12, 2013, pp. 137-188 ( PDF ).

Web links

• Stathis Kalyvas, Fergus Millar , Tony Honoré : Peter Marshall Fraser - A Commemoration on Saturday, May 31, 2008. PDF from All Souls College.
• Entry as British Academy Fellows of the British Academy.
• Simon Hornblower: Peter Fraser. In: The Independent of September 25, 2007.

Remarks

1. ↑ Louis Robert: Review by Fraser, Peter M .: Samotharce. II / 1. The Inscriptions on Stone. New York 1960. In: Gnomon. Volume 35, 1963, pp. 50-79.