209. Agoraphilia II - Can You Dig It?

Broadcast February 24, 2001


Prince Charming can sometimes appear from the most unlikely places. Devlin, Ontario, in this case. Homer Armstrong Thompson, who died in May of last year, would discover and awaken the sleeping Agora that had lain for centuries beneath Athenian ground. It wasn’t fast and it wasn’t easy, but archaeologists train themselves to look beyond days, weeks, months, and years.

Today, when magazine covers warn of the perils of human cloning, it’s easy to forget that there are other, subtler, less scientific methods of influencing a new human life. Thompson’s father, a dairy farmer who moved to British Columbia sometime after his son’s birth, had a great love for the Classics. Which explains the choice of the name Homer. Whatever he hoped to gain from the choice, things couldn’t have turned out more to his liking. Homer received his B.A. and M.A. in classics at the University of British Columbia in the mid-twenties and went on for a Ph.D from the University of Michigan, where he learned of a project sponsored by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, to excavate the general area of the city’s ancient agora. He applied for and received a fellowship and found his life’s work. And a wife, Dorothy Burr, who would become the first female fellow on the project and partner with Homer through the years.

On May 28, 1931, a field notebook reported, “In the afternoon, H.A. Thompson commenced the supervision of Section A." H.A. Thompson had his work cut out for him. First it was necessary to relocate the people of a whole crowded neighborhood of houses and shops dating back to the previous century and then to raze the buildings and begin carefully digging and sifting through over thirty feet and dozens of centuries of rubble. Their only clues to the precise location of the agora had been written several millennia previously. It wasn’t until 1938, during the excavation of the shop of one Simon the cobbler, that they would uncover a stone with the word ‘agora’ on it and know they were on the right tract. The second such stone would not be found for another 30 years. In the meantime, two wars would interrupt the work. No sooner had World War II ended, than a Greek civil war broke out. Thompson was said to have worked for allied intelligence during both conflicts. One account has him raising a white flag over the agora site and convincing both Greek factions that their common heritage was at stake and that they should go and fight somewhere else.

Gradually the work began to pay off. Artifacts appeared. Such as ballots cast by jurors during a trial, medicine vials of the kind that probably held the hemlock used to kill the condemned, such as Socrates, hobnails used by our friend Simon, pieces of pottery, known as ostracon, used to vote to exile (or ostracize) other felons. A puzzle was uncovered in the form of a building with a foundation newer than the walls. It turned out the Romans had been engaging in some historic re-creation of their own. Thompson helped raise funds from the Rockefellers and others to establish a museum in one of the restored buildings. By the time of his retirement in 1988, he could have the satisfaction of knowing he’d rescued one small, important piece of the past.