Another obituary – noteworthy inasmuch as it is written by a senior employee of the British Museum (who was also once a student of Peter’s) & that it specifically refers to the Elgin Marbles.

From:
The Guardian

Obituary
Peter Derow
Oxford historian and gentle champion of the ancient Greeks
Jonathan Williams
Friday February 2, 2007

The American-born Oxford academic Peter Derow, who has collapsed and died of a heart attack, aged 62, in the front quad of Wadham College, Oxford, was one of the most influential teachers of ancient Roman history of his generation. As fellow and tutor in ancient history at Wadham, he taught almost 30 years of undergraduates, many of whom have gone on in the field, with the shape and focus of their careers owing much to his inspiration. Tutorials with Derow introduced his students to the Enlightenment tradition of intellectual activity as a demanding but social and humane endeavour.

Peter was born in Newport, Rhode Island, the only child of Sidney Derow, a US navy medic, and Elma Kari. He attended the Roxbury Latin school and, for his first degree, Amherst College, Massachusetts, where he met and married his first wife, Ellan Odiorne. His second degree was at Wadham, where, from 1965 to 1967, he read greats – ancient philosophy and history – and took his first. It was in this period that he first encountered George Forrest, then ancient history tutor at Wadham, who was an intellectual influence and personal friend until his death in 1997.

After Oxford Peter returned to the US, where, at Princeton, he wrote a doctorate on Rome and the Greek world down to the third century BC, under the supervision of the Hellenistic historian and epigrapher C Bradford Welles, which led to his first academic position, at Toronto University.

In 1977, Forrest’s appointment to the Wykeham chair at Oxford led to Peter’s return to Wadham as fellow and tutor in ancient history, a position he held until his death. In recent years he also served as director of graduate studies in the Oxford classics faculty. He was as dedicated a graduate supervisor as he was undergraduate tutor; in both capacities I, like many others, was fortunate to benefit from his company, encouragement and wisdom.

Some years after returning to Wadham, Peter moved into Forrest’s old college rooms, accoutred among much other paraphernalia with a billiard table and a pair of dusky pink sofas of extraordinary sagginess and great comfort. He rarely sat on them, preferring to lean back on them sitting cross-legged on the floor, in order to facilitate access to his rolling tobacco and drink – usually retsina, in my recollection – placed neatly in front of him on a table. The room served as the perfect stage for his tutorial performances, which were in many ways the core of his academic life.

His published output was relatively limited and leaves far too much unsaid, especially on Polybius, the Greek historian of the rise of the Roman republic and the focus of much of Peter’s creative thought. His 1981 collection of sources co-edited with Roger Bagnall, Greek Historical Documents: the Hellenistic Period, was reissued in 2004. With its focus on inscriptions and papyri, it reveals Peter’s abiding interest in epigraphy, to which he had latterly returned, having recently begun work on a group of new Hellenistic inscriptions on the Aegean island of Chios.

He also co-edited a collection of essays in memory of Forrest in 2003 but, perhaps most importantly, contributed his sole major essay in narrative history on the Roman conquest of Greece in the early second century BC to the second edition of the Cambridge Ancient History, Vol 8, in 1989. He was conscious that he stood in the shadow of Maurice Holleaux, the great French historian and epigrapher, whose equivalent chapter in the first edition he praised for its humanity, a key virtue for Peter.

Wadham was the centre of Peter’s life, but he also travelled widely. He spoke Greek, Italian and French effortlessly, and German too, although despite his obvious fluency he claimed not to know it well. He was a great walker, and without fail in September he would pack up his gear in his Fiat Panda to spend several weeks walking in the Pyrenees, his rucksack liberally kitted out with cassoulet and cigarettes. En route he stopped in the Beaune region, where he would visit his favourite winemaker, Louis Chenu, happily tasting wines and stocking up for the coming year. Sometimes as a special treat back in Oxford, he would open one of these bottles, invariably offering his visitors either a “drop” or a “whisper”.

Peter’s passion for Greece, ancient and modern, expressed itself in a general distaste for the Romans, and a devotion to the cause of the return to Athens of the Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum, another enthusiasm he shared with Forrest. He was a founding member of the Marbles Reunited Campaign. He also had a great love of Greek music – indeed music of all sorts – and was himself a proficient exponent of bluegrass guitar.

A convivial and companionable personality, Peter was also a deeply reflective man whose private life was shared with only a few. He died instantly at the bottom of the staircase to his beloved rooms, which he feared having to vacate upon retirement. His second and third marriages were to Lucy Grieve and Emma Dench, and in latter years he shared his life with Rhiannon Ash. He is survived by two daughters, Catherine and Elizabeth, and a son, Paul, from his first marriage.

· Peter Sidney Derow, ancient historian, born April 11 1944; died December 9 2006