Stephen Gaylord Miller

Stephen (Steve) Gaylord Miller died on August 11, 2021 in Athens, Greece, at the age of 79.

Born on June 22, 1942, Miller grew up in Goshen, Indiana. He attended Wabash College, Indiana, receiving his A.B. in Greek in 1964. He had originally intended to major in Law, with a view to pursuing a career in politics; but he attributed his change of direction and interest in part to hearing an inspiring lecture and meeting with the famous Bronze Age archaeologist Giorgos Milonas when he visited the campus. He continued on to study Classical Archaeology in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, receiving his M.A. in 1967 and his Ph.D. in 1970, with a dissertation on the design and function of the Prytaneion (ancient Greek town-hall). During 1968/9 he held a Fulbright Fellowship to Greece at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA); and he also participated in Princeton excavations at Morgantina (Sicily) in 1967 and 1968, and in German excavations at Olympia in 1969.

Between 1969 and 1972, Miller worked as a member of the ASCSA team excavating the Agora in Athens, under the direction of T. Leslie Shear, Jr. In 1972/3 he was a research assistant at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. In 1971 he was appointed to the faculty position at UC Berkeley that he was to hold for the rest of his career, beginning in 1973 as assistant professor in the Department of Classics (now the Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies) and also as a core member of the Graduate Group in Ancient History and Medieval Archaeology (AHMA). Along with this appointment came the position as Director of the Nemea Excavations. He was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 1975 and full professor in 1981. From 1982-1987 he served as Director of the American School for Classical Studies at Athens, an important and prestigious position. As Director of ASCSA, Miller was active and effective in opening up the School and its library for wider use and encouraging a greater range of cultural programming. It was widely recognized that “he impressed the Greeks as an extraordinarily capable, intelligent director sympathetic to their needs and culture, and he had the high respect of the students and scholars there.” In 1987 he resumed the teaching of his regular full load of courses, while excavating every summer at Nemea, up until his retirement in 2004. He remained Director of the Nemea Excavations through 2004/5. After retirement, he and his wife, Effie, moved to reside primarily in the house that he had built for himself in Ancient Nemea, overlooking the site to which he had devoted almost the whole of his professional life. He became an honorary Greek citizen in 2005. During his retirement he continued to write and publish on his areas of expertise concerning Classical and Hellenistic Greek architecture and sculpture and on ancient athletics, while also lecturing and writing short opinion pieces about contemporary Greek politics and culture, and publishing a colorful and anecdote-rich autobiography. A new topic of research occupied him as well, which led to the completion of his last book: Into Darkness (Fotofolio Press, Athens 2020), in which he argued (based in part on evidence collected from the Christian-era remains at Nemea, but also from other sites around the world) that a sequence of natural disasters in the 6^th century CE had brought on a world-wide “Dark Age” that lasted throughout most of the 7^th and 8^th centuries. Meanwhile he continued up to his death tirelessly to promote Nemea and its ancient heritage as a tourist destination, and was active as a leader of the Society for the Revival of the Nemean Games, which he himself had founded in 1994. He died unexpectedly in Athens in 2021 after a short hospitalization.

Miller’s name and achievements as an archaeologist are associated above all with the ancient site of Nemea, in the northeast Peloponnese. In antiquity the site — known in myth as the place where the hero Heracles killed the Nemean Lion — was one of the four (along with Olympia, Delphi, and the Isthmus) that staged PanHellenic athletic contests: between the 6^th and 3^rd centuries BCE the Nemean Games took place every four years at the Sanctuary of Zeus, offering a full range of competitive events. After that date the sanctuary was largely abandoned and by the modern era had come to be almost entirely hidden from view under layers of earth and marshy reeds, with only three columns still standing of the once-imposing Hellenistic temple of Zeus. Minimal excavations by a French team in the 1880s, and then by the University of Cincinnati in the 1920s, had begun to uncover the antiquities; but it was only in 1971 that the ASCSA obtained a license from the Greek authorities to resume full-scale excavations, and that license was assigned to U.C. Berkeley. Miller was appointed as Director, and excavations began in summer 1974. During the years that followed, Miller and his then-wife Stella (now Professor Emerita Stella Miller-Collett of Bryn Mawr College) led teams comprising Berkeley students and local villagers working together to excavate and clear the sanctuary area and — a few hundred meters away — the stadium. Within a few years the complete lay-out of the whole sanctuary and stadium complex was revealed, including guest-house, bath-house, locker-room, and hero-shrine, as well as a large post-Classical Christian basilica. An arched stone tunnel also was discovered leading into the stadium, through which the athletes passed, its walls containing numerous graffiti written by them: this is believed to be the earliest specimen of Greek arch-construction. The expertly conducted, large-scale excavation amounted to one of the most successful and significant achievements of archaeologists in Greece during the later 20^th century, adding hugely to our understanding of the sociology and procedures of ancient athletic festivals. A state-of-the-art museum was completed, financed mainly by funds that Miller had raised from US donors, and in 1984 Miller on behalf of the University donated this museum to the Greek government and made it open to the general public. Radio and TV interviews, videos, and newspaper articles further spread the word internationally about ancient athletics and Nemea in particular, especially during the seasons of Olympic Games: Miller was a witty, lively, and indefatigable presenter, and by the mid-1980s ancient Nemea, previously ignored and completely off the beaten tourist track, had come to be recognized as a major destination. Overall, as one leading scholar of ancient athletics has remarked, “That a single excavation team did all of this and made a superb museum too is an immense credit to American archaeology in general — and to Berkeley and Miller in particular.”

Further large-scale fund-raising by Miller in Greece and the USA led also in due course to the reconstruction of several of the fallen columns of the temple of Zeus, a process that continued after his retirement from teaching, so that nowadays an impressive nine columns, rather than just three, are standing. As a further enhancement of the site’s appeal and of his own strong commitment to recreating continuities between the Classical Greek past and the present, in 1996 Miller inaugurated a new tradition of quadrennial “Nemean Games” at which men and women, boys and girls of all ages compete in running races on the ancient track. In 1996, the inaugural runners, more than 500 in all, included then-U.S. Ambassador to Greece Thomas Niles, then-Berkeley Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien, and former U.S. Olympic track coach Payton Jordan. The tradition of the renewed Games has continued since then, interrupted only by the Covid-19 epidemic of 2020.

Along with his widely recognized achievements as excavator, conservator, and promoter of the site at Nemea, Miller maintained a distinguished record of publications. His first book was based on his Princeton dissertation, The Prytaneion: Its Function and Architectural Form (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1978), and is regarded as the standard work on that topic. But for the most part his publications focused on the site of Nemea itself or on the history and characteristics of ancient Greek athletics at large and their relationship to Greek society and politics. His annual reports on the Nemea excavations appeared punctually in the journal Hesperia, and he lived to oversee as Editor the publication of four hard-cover, full-scale volumes of the “final reports” published by the University of California Press as a series Excavations at Nemea. Miller himself was sole author of Nemea II: The Early Hellenistic Stadium (U. C. Press 2001). On a smaller scale, he co-authored and edited the authoritative guidebook to the site and museum, Nemea, A Preliminary Guide (1984), revised as Nemea: A Guide to the Site and Museum (1990), and updated and expanded as Nemea: A Brief Guide (2nd ed. Athens 2004) — rightly described as “more than a guidebook … it can serve as a definitive summary of the site.”

From his work at Nemea, as well as his experience teaching ancient athletics and his enthusiastic interest in sports at both the collegiate and professional levels, Miller developed an unrivalled depth of knowledge of ancient Greek athletics. He published an invaluable sourcebook for the teaching of the subject: Arete: Greek Sports from Ancient Sources (first published in 1979; 3^rd edition 2004), and a deeply researched and copiously illustrated monograph Ancient Greek Athletics (Yale University Press 2004). Commenting on Miller’s scholarship in general, one distinguished reviewer commented, “Especially worthy of note is his readiness to combine archaeological, architectural, and philological-epigraphical evidence equally as bases for complete cultural-historical research and analysis. Overall, his work, though it concentrates on particular problems, is free from over-narrow specialization and displays a remarkable breadth of scholarly vision.” In a different vein, he published two autobiographies (the first of them playfully entitled Indiana Miller and the Temple of Nemean Zeus) in which he described in lively style and with numerous illustrations the milestones of his own career as an archaeologist, including sometimes bitter attacks on colleagues and those he regarded as professional opponents along with numerous anecdotes and warm acknowledgments of friends and collaborators from all over the world, especially in Greece.

In his teaching at Berkeley, Miller offered a wide range of courses in Greek and Roman archaeology, focusing especially on architecture and topography, sanctuaries, sculpture, and athletics. His undergraduate lecture course on ancient athletics drew large enrollments, including many from among Cal’s student athletes, and these students lauded his affability and accessibility. In one notable graduate seminar Miller led six students in painstakingly restoring and cataloguing a set of classical plaster casts that Phoebe Apperson Hearst donated to the university in 1902, but that had wound up sorely neglected, stored under Edwards Track’s bleachers. For students, working at Nemea was demanding but rewarding, and in all these contexts his tireless energy, hospitality, and passionate commitment to the project of excavating and presenting Nemea and his vision of the ancient athletic ideal as vividly and engagingly as possible to the general public impressed and captivated all who worked with him. Outside the campus, in radio, TV, film, and newspaper interviews and articles, public lectures (including his annual “Nemea Night” at Berkeley every December), published videos, and innumerable dinners and speeches, he built ongoing and deep relationships of collaboration and mutual affection and respect between himself and many supporters of Nemea, including several leading members of the Greek government and archaeological services and many who came to Nemea to participate, bare-foot and chiton-clad, in the Games every four years. Among the flood of appreciative testimonials in his honor that appeared in the Greek media after his death, one captures especially well the prevailing sentiment: “What is the word in English for the metal more valuable than gold? Stefanos Miller is platinum to us.”

Among the many awards and honors that Miller received were the following: 1975-7, 1977-9, 1979-81 NEH Research Grant; 1979 Corresponding Member, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut; 1981 Honorary Citizen, Archaia Nemea, Greece; 1991 Order of the Golden Bear, University of California; 1996 Honorary Doctorate, University of Athens; 2004 Person of the Week, ABC World News Tonight, August 20. From 1995, he served (as the only non-Greek member) on the Board of Advisors to the Minister of Culture, Greece, for the repatriation of the Parthenon Marbles. Upon his retirement in 2004, the University awarded him the Berkeley Citation, and in 2005 he became an honorary Greek citizen. His many Greek friends, colleagues, and admirers regarded him as a true “friend of Greece,” and a street is named after him in the town of Archaia Nemea. He enjoyed exceptional esteem in the international circle of archaeologists working in Greece. With his work at Nemea, his publications, and his personal energy and devotion to both of his two homelands, he brought lustre and appreciation to the University of California and established a legacy that is being gratefully continued by UC Berkeley’s Nemea Center for Classical Archaeology.

Miller is survived by his widow, Effie Davlantes Miller (married October 1999).

Mark Griffith
Donald Mastronarde
2022