Susan Ballou and the Scriptores Historiae Augustae

Abstract

Among the female students of the ancient world who have largely been written out of the record is Susan Helen Ballou (1868-1940). She was a scholar of Latin who taught for years at the University of Chicago, Bryn Mawr, and elsewhere. She spent several stints at the American School of Classical Studies in Rome where she mastered the complex manuscript tradition of what is known as the Scriptores Historiae Augustae (SHA), or Historia Augusta, culminating in a German doctorate and an invitation to be part of a new Teubner edition of the SHA. Her contribution to the edition was aborted but she became a key contributor to the first volume of the Loeb SHA. The story of Ballou’s academic life and work has never been told. Piecing it together from a range of documents, published and unpublished, not only illuminates her career and publications. It also helps explain why, although a reputable scholar in her day in both the USA and Europe, Ballou has largely disappeared from the scholarly record. She was not only a woman at a time when women encountered institutional obstacles to appointment and advancement, but she also specialised in a Latin text never read or taught in American universities. Recent research on the manuscripts of the SHA is bringing a fresh appreciation of Ballou’s distinctive and fundamental contribution to the study of the SHA. The time has come to reclaim her reputation and achievement as Latinist and palaeographer.