Frank M. Snowden Jr., at 95; renowned scholar of blacks in antiquity

WASHINGTON -- Frank M. Snowden Jr., 95, a Howard University classicist for almost 50 years whose research into blacks in ancient Greece and Rome opened a new field of study, died Sunday at Grand Oaks assisted living home. He had congestive heart failure.

As a black man, Dr. Snowden was a rarity in classics, but ancient history consumed him since his youth as a prize-winning student at the Boston Latin School and later at Harvard University. His body of work led to a National Humanities Medal in 2003, a top government honor for scholars, writers, actors and artists.

"A lion-hearted classicist, he is an Olympian man," said President Bush in his presentation of the award.

Much of Dr. Snowden's scholarship centered on one point: that blacks in the ancient world seemed to have been spared the virulent racism common to later Western civilization. "The onus of intense color prejudice cannot be placed upon the shoulders of the ancients," he wrote.

His most notable books are "Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience" (1970), which took him 15 years to research, and "Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks" (1983). Both were published by Harvard University Press.

Using evidence he found in literature and art, he showed that blacks were able not only to coexist with Greeks and Romans but also were often revered as charioteers, fighters, and actors.

Because Romans and Greeks first encountered blacks as soldiers and mercenaries and not slaves or "savages," they did not classify them as inferior and seek ways to rationalize their enslavement, he said.

William Harris, a Columbia University professor who specializes in Greek and Roman history, said Dr. Snowden was the first person to write in a serious way about blacks in antiquity and his books influenced other scholars, including George M. Fredrickson ("Racism: A Short History") and Martin Bernal ("Black Athena").

However, Harris said, "Snowden really wanted to find a world in antiquity which was without the plague that inflicted America throughout its history, and he pushed the evidence too far to find an ideal premodern, premedieval world. There was undoubtedly some racism in antiquity, but he talked it down to being minimal. . . . He was right, to a point."

M. I. Finley, an eminent Cambridge University classicist, once wrote in The Washington Post that "Blacks in Antiquity" tended toward overstatement but that it was "at least something" in a much-neglected field.

Dr. Snowden was born in York County, Va., His father, Frank M., an Army officer who retired as a colonel, moved the family to Boston. Dr. Snowden was the brother of Otto Snowden, who with his wife, Muriel, founded Freedom House, an interracial civic center in Roxbury. The couple were pillars in Boston's black community. Otto Snowden died in 1995.

Dr. Snowden's wife, Elaine, died in 2005.

He leaves a daughter, Jane Lepscky of Washington; a son, Frank, of New Haven, Conn.; four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Services will be held at 10:30 a.m. tomorrow at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington.