Foreword Gregory Nagy Gregory Nagy Harvard University gnagy@chs.harvard.edu

Gregory Nagy is Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. His special research interests are archaic Greek literature and oral poetics, and he finds it rewarding to integrate these interests with information technology. He was Chair of Harvard's undergraduate Literature Concentration from 1989 to 1994, and of Harvard's Classics Department from 1994 to 2000. Currently he is Director of Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C., while teaching half-time at Harvard's Cambridge campus.

 James O'Donnell James O'Donnell Georgetown University jod@georgetown.edu

James J. O'Donnell is Provost at Georgetown University. He has published widely on the history and culture of the late antique Mediterranean world and is a recognized innovator in the application of networked information technology in higher education. In 1990, he co-founded Bryn Mawr Classical Review, the second on-line scholarly journal in the humanities ever created. In 1994, he taught an Internet-based seminar on the work of Augustine of Hippo that reached 500 students. He has served as a Director and as President of the American Philological Association; he has also served as a Councillor of the Medieval Academy of America and has been elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy. He serves as Delegate of the APA to the American Council of Learned Societies and serves as Chair of the Executive Committee of the Delegates and as a member of the Board of Trustees of the ACLS.

000036 003 1 frontmatter 26 February 2009

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A brief remembrance of Ross Scaife

 Foreword

This is a book about the future, not about Ross Scaife. That's the way it should be, and that's the way he would have wanted it.

For Ross was a scholar and teacher who knew in his bones that the steady, thoughtful consideration of the human past is a tool of unmatched power for informing humankind's ability to imagine and enact futures worthy of the intelligence and dignity of its every member. To honor him best, we should share in that conviction and learn from the resourcefulness and persistence of his practice.

Ross's career flourished in the twin decades of the information revolution. Whatever the globalized society we share may now experience, we live ineluctably in an information society. What we invent now, what we do now will entail living out the implications of a transformation that has already happened. Through the too few years that Ross was given to shape his vision and share it with others, he kept his eye clearly on ways to make sure that the revolution in knowing will serve his profession and through it his society.

His convictions were clear and luminous. The best that we can know about the past needs to be preserved and disseminated by the most powerful media available to the widest audience possible. The Stoa consortium that he led gave example repeatedly to the force of those convictions and their power to change for the better the ways we learn and think and teach.

We both learned from, were inspired by, and benefited from Ross's friendship. We feel the ache of his loss deeply, but we are delighted to see in this volume an exactly appropriate response to loss: innovation, optimism, and the commitment of teachers and scholars to receiving, interpreting, and transmitting the heritage of humankind's pasts to its present and future. Ross, we think, would be glad to read this book, and then soon enough impatient to get beyond its insights to the next stage. He reminds us of another Kentuckyan of yore, Daniel Boone, who made it to the frontier ahead of the rest, and then kept uprooting and moving further west, always seeing and seizing opportunity, always staying at the leading edge. We owe him the tribute of emulation.