The Greek and Roman Classics faculty from the The Department of Religion and Ancient Mediterranean Studies is pleased to present our annual Daniel P. Tompkins Lecture on Diversity in the Ancient Mediterranean.

Please join us for a lecture with T. Corey Brennan (Graduate Director and Professor of Classics, Rutgers University) on The Bizarre Career, Death and Afterlife of Byron Caldwell Smith (1849-1877), the Kansas Hellenist Who Became America’s Most Quoted Classicist

It is hard to imagine a Valentine’s Day without seeing online quotes from the classicist Byron Caldwell Smith (1849-1877).  Excerpts from Smith’s love letters to one of his undergraduate Greek students, Kate Stephens, have gone viral in the modern age, making him arguably the most quoted classicist in the realm of contemporary social media. Forced out of his post at the University of Kansas following a faculty whisper campaign that alleged prior salacious conduct in Greece, he retreated to Philadelphia, where he ostensibly worked as a newspaper journalist. Smith died at aged 27, allegedly from a rare condition too obscene to mention on this flyer.

Kate Stephens spent the rest of her life championing Smith's memory, combating a flood of allegations against her former teacher. This presentation reviews the basic received narrative of Smith's strange tale, and argues that almost every aspect is open to interrogation regarding the facts. The talk also situates the story of Byron Caldwell Smith in the context of frontier Classics in the immediate post-Civil War period, and reflects on the process that in our day strangely has made Smith an internet mini-sensation.