In 1943 A. W. Gomme, who initiated the standard commentary on the Greek historian Thucydides, called William Scott Ferguson "perhaps the most distinguished living historian of Ancient Greece." Ferguson, working with an insight that first came to him as a graduate student, had a long and productive career as author of scholarly monographs, historical narrative, and popular presentations of the Greek world from its emergence from the Dark Ages about 800 B.C. until the domination of the Mediterranean by Rome in the last two centuries B.C. As a teacher, he directed the dissertations and influenced the careers of some dozen of the most distinguished American historians of the ancient world. As an administrator, he helped guide Harvard University into the tumultuous academic world that followed World War II. His scholarly work still remains the foundation of research into the complicated world of the Mediterranean in the centuries after...