HAMMOND, Mason 1903-2002

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born February 14, 1903, in Boston, MA; died October 13, 2002, in Cambridge, MA. Historian, educator, and author. Hammond was a scholar of Latin and of Roman history who for many decades was a fixture at Harvard University. He was a graduate of Harvard in 1925 and earned his B.Litt. from Balliol College, Oxford in 1930. Although he had teaching stints at Radcliffe College and the American Academy in Rome during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Hammond spent most of his academic life at Harvard, where he began as an instructor in 1928, moving up to Pope Professor of Latin Language and Literature from 1950 to 1973. His only major interruption to his service to Harvard occurred during World War II, when he was an army intelligence officer assigned to locate art treasures stolen by the Nazis. For this service he achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel and was awarded the Bronze Star and Legion of Honor. A highly regarded expert on Roman history, Hammond was the author of several enduring works on the subject, including The Augustan Principate (1933; enlarged edition, 1968) and City State and World State in Greek and Roman Political Theory to Augustus (1951). Interested in the history of Harvard University, he was also the author of Revolutionary Harvard Today: A Walking Tour with Mason Hammond, 1775-1776, 1975-1976 (1976). A former Rhodes scholar, Hammond could also count among his many academic honors the 1987 Harvard Medal of the Harvard Alumni Association and an honorary D.H.L. from the university, the last which he received in 1994.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

books

Directory of American Scholars, tenth edition, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2002.

periodicals

New York Times, October 21, 2002, p. A21.