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15 OCTOBER 1924 * 18 AUGUST 2OO4
DEATH has deprived the world of Classical learning of one of its most versatile and humane exponents: Michael H. Jameson, the Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies Emeritus at Stanford University, died of cancer in Stanford Hospital on 18 August 2004, two months before his eightieth birthday. His memory was honored in a memorial service on 20 October 2004, in the Stanford Memorial Church.
Jameson was born in London, England, on 15 October 1924, during a visit of his parents, Raymond D. Jameson, professor of Western literature at the University of Peking (now Beijing), and Rose Perel Jameson. He spent his early years in Beijing, where he remembered meeting as a child scholars like I. A. Richards and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. After the divorce of his parents in 1935, he moved with his mother to London. In the City of London Schools he began the study of Greek and Latin, which he continued at the University of Chicago, receiving his A.B., with Greek as his major field, in 1942 at the age of seventeen. It was in a class on Thucydides in that year that he met Virginia Broyles, who was to become his wife after his discharge from service in the U.S. Navy as a Japanese translator (1943-46). They were happily married for fiftyeight years, and produced four sons, Nick, Anthony, John, and David.
The newlyweds settled in Chicago, where Mike completed his doctoral studies, and received his Ph.D. in 1949 with a dissertation on "The Offering at Meals: Its Place in Greek Sacrifice." I first met him during this period when we both worked in the Graduate Classics Reading Room. A cordial friendship quickly developed between us and was in due course extended to our families.
There are few areas of Greek studies that Michael Jameson's fertile and inquisitive mind did not try to explore. In his classroom lectures and seminars as well as in his well over sixty articles he showed interrelations between religion and locality, traditional text and inscription, literature and history. His written contributions to all these fields extend to well over half a century. He saw any given problem threedimensionally; that made...