Thomas Robert Shannon Broughton

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Thomas Robert Shannon Broughton (born 1900; died 1993) was a Canadian classical scholar and leading Latin prosopographer of the twentieth century. He is especially noted for his definitive three-volume work, Magistrates of the Roman Republic (1951-1986).

Broughton was born in 1900 in Corbetton, Ontario. He attended Victoria College at the University of Toronto, where he received a B.A. in 1921 with honors in classics. He earned his M.A. in 1922. After studying at the University of Chicago, he was made a Rogers Fellow at Johns Hopkins University, where he received a Ph.D. in Latin in 1928, having studied under the famed ancient historian Tenney Frank (1876-1939).

He began his teaching career at Victoria College, Toronto. Broughton would go on to teach at Amherst College, Bryn Mawr College (1928-1965) and, later, serve as George L. Paddison Professor of Latin at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1965-1971), where the Library Epigraphy Room, created at his behest, remains a seminal resource. Broughton's main scholarly work was his massive, 3 volume Magistrates of the Roman Republic (1951-1986). This project required more than 30 years to complete, but provides an unparalleled accounting of the names of those men elected to office during the Roman Republic. In 1953 the Magistrates of the Roman Republic was recognized with the Award of Merit from the American Philological Association. Although he retired from UNC in 1971 (then aged 71), he would continue to work and advise students until his death in 1993.

Broughton’s career included a variety of academic appointments and awards: visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University, Simon F. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, holder of a Fulbright research grant to Italy and professor in charge of the School of Classical Studies of the American Academy in Rome.

Broughton served as president of the American Philological Association and as vice president of the International Federation of Societies of Classical Studies for 10 years. He was a member of the American Philosophical Society, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honorary member of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, a corresponding member of the German Archaeological Institute and a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. Three universities awarded him honorary LL.D. degrees: Johns Hopkins University in 1969, the University of Toronto in 1971 and UNC-CH in 1974.

In 1931, he married Annie Leigh Hobson Broughton of Norfolk, Virginia. They had two children, Margaret Broughton Tenney and T. Alan Broughton (b. 1936), a poet and pianist and professor emeritus of the University of Vermont. Mrs. Broughton died on September 19, 2005, in Charleston, South Carolina.

[edit] Works

• [dissertation] The Romanization of Africa Proconsularis (1929, reissued 1968).
• "Was Sallust Fair to Cicero?" TAPA 67:34-46 (1936).
• Magistrates of the Roman Republic (1951-1986).
• "Roman Asia Minor", in Tenney Frank, An Economic Survey of Ancient Rome IV (1938)
• "Candidates Defeated in Roman Elections: some ancient Roman 'also-rans'" Transactions of the American Philological Association 81.4 (1991).

[edit] References

• Jerzy Linderski in BDNAC pp. 64-66;
• George W. Houston in J. Linderski (ed.), Imperium Sine Fine: T. Robert S. Broughton and the Roman Republic (1996) pp. 1-30, 35-42.