Peter Derow

Peter Sidney Derow (11 April 1944 – 9 December 2006) was Hody Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at Wadham College, Oxford and University Lecturer in Ancient History from 1977 to 2006. As a scholar he was most noted for his work on Hellenistic and Roman Republican history and epigraphy, particularly on the histories of Polybius. Born in Newport, Rhode Island, Derow obtained his secondary education at The Roxbury Latin School in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. After an A.B. degree at Amherst (with Peter K. Marshall), he read for Greats as a second B.A. degree at Oxford in 1965–1967, achieving a First. At Oxford he was taught by, among others, W. G. (George) Forrest, who was a lasting influence. He completed a Ph.D. at Princeton on 'Rome and the Greek world from the earliest contacts to the end of the first Illyrian war', for which Professor J. V. A. Fine was his Advisor; in the preface to that work, he acknowledges the additional inspiration he had drawn from T. J. Luce and the historian and epigrapher C. Bradford Welles. After a spell of teaching at the University of Toronto, he returned to succeed Forrest at Wadham in 1977 when the latter was elected to the Wykeham Professorship of Ancient History at New College. In 2002–2005 Derow was also Director of Graduate Studies in ancient history for the Oxford Faculty of Classics. He was a contributor to the Oxford Classical Dictionary in matters relating to the Hellenistic world and the Roman republic, and wrote the chapter on ‘Rome, the fall of Macedon and the sack of Corinth’ for the 2nd edition of the Cambridge Ancient History (volume 8; 1989). In this chapter, he expounded his view of Roman imperialism in the Greek East as harsh, a view he had earlier proposed in an article on Polybius and Roman imperialism; a more accessible version of these views can be found in his chapter in the Blackwell Companion to the Hellenistic world. These (and other papers) represent a sustained argument about the impact of Rome on the Helle