Samuel Walter Miller, LL. D., Litt. D. (May 5, 1864 – July 28, 1949) was an American linguist, classics scholar and archaeologist responsible for the first American excavation in Greece and a founder of the Stanford University Classics department.
Early life
He was born in Ashland County, Ohio to agrarian parents. After receiving an M.A. from the University of Michigan in 1884, he requested further funding from his father to pursue studies in Germany. His father noted that he couldn't possibly see how anyone could ever need any more education but Miller moved to the University of Leipzig for doctoral studies from 1884 to 1885. The next year he joined the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece, where Professor Frederic de Forest Allen charged Miller with the first American excavation in Greece, seeking the stage of the Theater of Thorikos. 25-30 workmen were paid 1 drachma per day and total project budget was $300. While Miller did not consider it a success, later scholars found it significant in solving problems connected to the Greek stage.
At the conclusion of the academic year, Miller set off on a walking tour he hoped would take him all the way to Istanbul, visiting archaeological sites along the way. He did not get beyond the further slope of one of the mountain ranges which encircle Athens. On only his second day out, he was robbed, beaten unconscious, and left for dead by two local villagers. The bloodied Miller managed to return to Athens to lodge a complaint with the local authorities. The authorities thereupon commissioned Miller as a captain in the Greek army, and sent him out with a posse to apprehend the criminals. A few days later the brigands were in jail. To his credit, Miller altered his testimony at their trial so the two would not be sentenced to death. They were, however, sentenced to ten years in a prison on the island of Aegina.
Start of career
Miller returned to the United States as an instructor of Greek at the University of Michigan during the 1886–87 school year and of Latin and Sanskrit in the 1887–88 year, beginning a fifty-year career as a college professor – without ever returning to finish his doctoral degree. Walter Miller married Jennie Emerson, niece of Ralph Waldo Emerson, on September 13, 1888, in Racine, Wisconsin. Jennie Emerson Miller (August 7, 1860 – March 1, 1946) had studied Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, French, German and science and was an invaluable assistant to her husband. By 1889 Walter Miller was an acting assistant professor at Michigan, but the family returned to Leipzig for the next two years and daughters Edith and Marjorie were born in Germany. He worked as the senior at the Royal Archaeological Seminary at the University of Leipzig from 1890 to 1891.
The family returned to Columbia, Missouri, when he accepted a position as an associate professor of Greek at the University of Missouri for the 1891–92 school year. In the fall of 1891, Miller received both a letter and a telegram from Stanford University President David Starr Jordan offering him a position with the newly formed Classics Department. A quick discussion with the executive committee of the Missouri Board of Curators resulted in a promotion in both rank and salary, with the promise of a full professorship of archaeology the next academic year. Nonetheless, in 1892 he was appointed professor of Latin and archaeology at Stanford University.
Miller, his wife Jennie and his two daughters Edith and Marjorie built a house at 2275 Amherst Street in the College Terrace neighborhood of Palo Alto, California. For the next ten years he served Stanford, as professor of archaeology (1894–96), professor of classical philology (1896–1902) and also as secretary of the faculty from 1897 to 1901. With differing views from the departmental administration on the future of the classics department, and determined to continue publishing, he voluntarily resigned in 1902. Correspondence with President Jordan indicates an amicable departure.
As professor of Greek, and later philology at the Tulane University, he began his administrative experience, becoming dean of the graduate school and later dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. At the same time his editorial endeavors began, with the Southern Educational Review and later the Classical Journal.