As a child, I sometimes came upon a dish of food set before a painted rock as I explored the bush around our mission station and often saw women of the town praying for fertility before a giant baobab tree around which strips of cloth were tied. He often reminded me of the parallels between the Greeks and the Yoruba, both living in city-states and both worshipping a pantheon of deities. in Southern History, taught history at Iwo Baptist College (now Bowen University in Iwo, Nigeria).
In recent years, I have gained the insight that my ideas about the religious usage of the tyrant slayers as founding heroes of the Athenian democracy were influenced by my childhood spent as the son of Southern Baptist missionaries living amongst the Yoruba in what was then the Western Region of the British Protectorate of Nigeria. And he never discouraged, but instead encouraged and urged on the thinking processes and ideas of a lowly graduate student. But despite the prevailing troubled atmosphere, Greg Nagy kept our attention focused on the language of Homer and kept asking about the transcendent meaning of the words. The academic job market seemed almost non-existent. The Turks had overrun the excavation site at which I had worked as a field archaeologist with Emily Vermeule in the previous summer, and there had been looting of the dig finds (over which members of the excavation team including myself had labored many hours) that were stored in the apotheke of Agios Mammas Church in Morphou. The final tragic chapter of the war in South Vietnam and Cambodia - in which I had served as a naval officer - was taking place. There were severe economic troubles that followed in the wake of the Yom Kippur War and the Arab oil embargo.
That winter of 1974–1975 was a period of political uncertainty following the resignation of Richard Nixon.
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