Walter Miller (philologist)

Samuel Walter Miller, LL. D., Litt. D. (May 5, 1864 – July 28, 1949) was an American linguist, classics scholar and archaeologist responsible for the first American excavation in Greece and a founder of the Stanford University Classics department.

He was born in Ashland County, Ohio to agrarian parents. After receiving an M.A. from the University of Michigan in 1884, he requested further funding from his father to pursue studies in Germany. His father noted that he couldn't possibly see how anyone could ever need any more education but Miller moved to the University of Leipzig for doctoral studies from 1884-5. The next year he joined the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece, where Professor Frederic de Forest Allen charged Miller with the first American excavation in Greece, seeking the stage of the Theater of Thorikos. 25-30 workmen were paid 1 drachma per day and total project budget was $300. While Miller did not consider it a success, later scholars found it significant in solving problems connected to the Greek stage.

At the conclusion of the academic year, Miller set off on a walking tour he hoped would take him all the way to Istanbul, visiting archaeological sites along the way. He did not get beyond the further slope of one of the mountain ranges which encircle Athens. On only his second day out, he was robbed, beaten unconscious, and left for dead by two local villagers. The bloodied Miller managed to return to Athens to lodge a complaint with the local authorities. The authorities thereupon commissioned Miller as a captain in the Greek army, and sent him out with a posse to apprehend the criminals. A few days later the brigands were in jail. To his credit, Miller altered his testimony at their trial so the two would not be sentenced to death. They were, however, sentenced to ten years in a prison on the island of Aegina.

Miller returned to the United States as an instructor of Greek at the University of Michigan during the 1886–87 school year and of Latin and Sanskrit in the 1887–88 year, beginning a fifty-year career as a college professor – without ever returning to finish his doctoral degree. Walter Miller married Jennie Emerson, niece of Ralph Waldo Emerson, on September 13, 1888, in Racine, Wisconsin. Jennie Emerson Miller (August 7, 1860 – March 1, 1946) had studied Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, French, German and science and was an invaluable assistant to her husband. By 1889 Walter Miller was an acting assistant professor at Michigan, but the family returned to Lepizig for the next two years and daughters Edith and Marjorie were born in Germany. He worked as the senior at the Royal Archaeological Seminary at the University of Leipzig from 1890 to 1891.

...
Wikipedia