Frank Edward Brown, 1908-1988
by Russell T. Scott
From the American Journal of Archaeology 92 (1988)

On 28 February 1988, Frank Edward Brown, long associated with the city of Rome and the American Academy in Rome, died of a stroke at 79 in the Lely Palms Healthcare Center, Marco Island, Florida. Born in LaGrange, Illinois, on 24 May 1908, Brown took his undergraduate degree at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, in 1929 and first came to Rome and to the Academy in 1931 as a graduate student of Yale University.

Following his years at the Academy as a Fellow, Brown went on in 1932 to excavate at Dura-Europus in Syria as a member of the joint Yale University- Académie des Inscriptions (France) mission under the direction of Franz Cumont and Michael Rostovtzeff and became field director at Dura in 1935. Thereafter he returned to Yale to complete his doctorate in 1938 and served as Assistant Professor of Classics there until the American entry into World War II. During the war he served the Office of War Information in Syria and Lebanon and in 1945 became Director General of Antiquities of the Republic of Syria.

His return to the American Academy from Syria in 1947 marked the beginning of the Academy's involvement in archaeological fieldwork in Italy with the excavations of the Latin colony of Cosa (Ansedonia) in southwestern Tuscany, a site which has since become a template for the archaeology of Latin colonies and mid-Republican Rome itself. Brown remained at the Academy as Professor in Charge of the Classical School and Director of Excavations from 1947-1952 and then returned to Yale as Professor of Classics where in addition to his teaching responsibilities he continued to be active in the publication of Dura- Europus and in the life of the American Schools of Oriental Research, the offices of which were then in New Haven. He was Secretary of ASOR, 1955-1962, and Master of Jonathan Edwards College, 1953-1956, and in collaboration with his Yale colleagues, Professors Lawrence and Emeline Richardson, pro- duced the second volume of the Cosa excavation re- ports, The Temples of the Arx, in 1960.

In the same period he served the Archaeological Institute of America as Trustee and Norton Lecturer. In 1963, however, Brown left Yale to return permanently to the American Academy, resuming the positions of Professor in Charge and Director of Excavations to which were added the responsibilities of the directorship of the Academy in 1965-1969. Nevertheless these years saw him characteristically active both in Rome and in Ansedonia. In 1963 he made soundings in the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli and at the invitation of the Archaeological Superintendency of Rome returned in 1964 to the Regia in the Roman Forum, a building of which he had made an architectural study during his years as a Fellow, and the excavation of which was to yield the most substantial evidence for early organization and development of the Forum since the work of Giacomo Boni at the turn of the century. In 1965 he resumed work at Cosa supervising fieldwork and the preparation of additional publications of the Cosa series, and the design, con- struction, and outfitting of the site museum, since 1981 the National Museum of Cosa.

From Rome he was also able to further the work of other American archaeologists in Italy and Yugoslavia as well as the corpus of Roman mosaics in North Africa and the international project to safeguard the Punic and Roman antiquities of Carthage. While Director of the Academy he was also President of the International Union of the Institutes of Archaeology, History, and the History of Art in Rome in 1966-1967, and he was active in the affairs of the International Association for Classical Archaeology throughout his years in Rome.

Having resigned the directorship of the Academy in 1969, Brown remained Professor in Charge of the Classical School until his retirement in 1976 when he received the Academy's Medal of Merit for his many years of outstanding service to that institution. He continued to serve the Academy thereafter as Thomas Spencer Jerome Lecturer in 1979, from which series came the book Cosa: The Making of a Roman Town (1980), and as the leader of a summer seminar sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities on the early colonies of Rome in 1980. In 1982 he was Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts of the National Gallery in Washington where he continued to work on Vitruvius and returned to the study of the architecture of the Hierothesion of Antiochus I of Commagene at Nemrud Dagh, a project he had helped develop for ASOR in the 1950s. His last years in Rome were given over to the preparation of final reports on the excavations in the forum of Cosa and the Regia in the Roman Forum. On 21 April 1983, he was honored for his services to Italian archaeology by the city of Rome as Cultore di Roma.

In Italy he was a foreign member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and of the Societŕ Nazionale di Scienze, Lettere e Arti in Napoli, and the Istituto di Studi Etruschi ed Italici (Firenze), and a member of the Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia and the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut. In America he was a member of ASOR, AIA, and the American Philological Association. In March 1987 Frank Brown took leave of Rome and the American Academy to join his wife of 50 years, the former Jaquelin Goddard, in Florida.

This bald summary, like the lapidary cursus and his own elegant and evocative book Roman Architecture (1962), barely reveals the man and the remarkable resources he brought to the study of the monuments of Roman antiquity and generously put at the disposition of members of the Academy and his colleagues in North America and the Mediterranean over the years. It is no exaggeration to say that his approach to Roman archaeology has influenced a generation of American and Italian archaeologists; so it may be in order here to recall it and some of its sources briefly.

By Brown's own account it was Michael Rostovtzeff who drew him from literature to the study of Roman antiquity as a whole and the architect Gorham Philipps Stevens, Director of the American Academy 1917-1932 and Director of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens 1939-1941, who focused his artistic impulses on architecture. His ex- perience of Mesopotamian archaeology in the 1930s led him to appreciate the primary importance of stratigraphy in fieldwork, while the fact that the study of Greek and Roman architecture at the time depended significantly on trained architects led him the more quickly to the ancient architects themselves as revealed in their works or exceptionally, as with Vitruvius, in their writings.

It was not, however, merely a long-term association with architects that kept sharp a naturally keen eye for proportions and details, but the same striving he admired in Rostovtzeff "...by understanding and imagination to compass the life of a segment of the past in its totality." Frank Brown's goal was the understanding of the Roman past from its infancy on the Palatine to the twilight of the forms of imperial civilization. To this end he subjected texts and the other physical remains that randomly attest the sequential development of the res Romana to the same rigorous scrutiny, confident that these disparate materials could be made to yield precise images not only of the changing worlds the Romans inhabited and shaped but of the spiritual forces that generated them as well.

For him the world of the Romans was distinct from all others, as he concluded after long experience was the Arab from the Occidental, and he spent his professional career working to assemble these images into a coherent synthesis. Those who have observed him at work -- whether on Plautus, Lucan, Tacitus or Vitruvius, on single buildings or complexes in the city of Rome, on Hellenistic and Roman fortifications, the planning of towns and their territories -- have all felt the force of the purposefulness with which he pursued it. And even if he did not achieve the complete realization of the vision toward which he strove, the insights he has left us will continue to serve the cause of Roman studies in the future as he did in his lifetime.

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