Imagine my surprise to read this item on espn.com today: “Tusculum (College)’s (Bo) Cordell set a Div. II record for career total offense in his final college game while throwing for 569 yards in a 49-42 victory over Mars Hill.” I was quite well acquainted with Tusculum, but not Tusculum College. I had to look it up. It is in Greeneville, TN, and boasts three distinctive features:

1. It was founded in 1794, which makes it the oldest college in Tennessee. In fact it is older than the state of Tennessee.
2. It is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church.
3. There are no semesters. Students take one class at a time for eighteen days. This would not have worked too well for me. I once missed more than eighteen days of school in a row.

A little digging produced the origin of the name. The school was named after John Witherspoon’s farm in New Jersey. Both of the founders of the antecedents of Tusculum College were students and admirers of Witherspoon when he was the president of Princeton. Witherspoon named his farm after Tusculum because he was a devotee of Cicero, who had a villa in Tusculum, a city located in the Alban Hills south of Rome.

Tusculum has a long and proud history. Well, nobody actually lives there any more, but if they did, they probably would be quite proud of their history. The legend is that it was founded by Telegonus, a son of Ulysses. During the imperial era the wealthy and powerful Romans constructed villas in Tusculum and the surrounding countryside. During the tenth and eleventh centuries the counts of Tusculum were the dominant force in Roman politics, occasionally challenged by the Crescentius family that was based in the Sabine Hills to the north. Three Tusculans in a row, Benedict VIII, his brother John XIX, and their nephew Benedict IX (who was officially the pontiff on three different occasions) sat in St. Peter’s Throne and ruled all of Christendom (in a spiritual way) as well as the Papal States of central Italy (in every way).

Alas, Tusculum was completely destroyed by the Romans in 1191. There are no remnants of the city of the twelfth century. No stone was left upon a stone.

I went to visit Tusculum in 2011. Our driver told us that we were the only people who had ever asked him to take them to Tusculum. It is now a park and an archeological site. I was interested in seeing what remained of the medieval Tusculum with which I was familiar. The answer was nothing. The archeological digs were unearthing remains of the imperial city that was buried beneath the medieval city. The latter had been completely obliterated by the Romans.

You can read about my trip to Tusculum here.