Peter Derow

Who was Peter Derow?

Peter Sidney Derow, MA, PhD was Hody Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at Wadham College, Oxford and University Lecturer in Ancient History from 1977 to 2006. As a scholar he was most noted for his work on Hellenistic and Roman Republican history and epigraphy, particularly on the histories of Polybius.

Derow obtained his secondary education at The Roxbury Latin School in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. After an A.B. degree at Amherst, he read for Greats as a second B.A. degree at Oxford in 1965–1967, achieving a First. At Oxford he was taught by, among others, W. G. Forrest, who was a lasting influence. He completed a Ph.D. at Princeton on 'Rome and the Greek world from the earliest contacts to the end of the first Illyrian war', for which Professor J. V. A. Fine was his Advisor; in the preface to that work, he acknowledges the additional inspiration he had drawn from T. J. Luce and the historian and epigrapher C. Bradford Welles. After a spell of teaching at the University of Toronto, he returned to succeed Forrest at Wadham in 1977 when the latter was elected to the Wykeham Professorship of Ancient History at New College.