Anthon, Charles (17 November 1797–29 July 1867), professor of Greek and Latin, was born in New York City, the son of Dr. George Christian Anthon, a surgeon of German ancestry, and his French wife Genevieve Judot. A conspicuously brilliant student at Columbia College (1811–1815), Anthon opted for the legal profession and was admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court of New York State. He practiced little, however, for in 1820 he was called to Columbia, where he was to spend his entire professional life. He rose from adjunct professor of Greek and Latin (1820–1830) to become John Jay Professor of Greek Language and Literature, a post he held from 1830 to his death. From 1830 to 1864 he was also rector of the grammar school attached to Columbia, where he was a harsh taskmaster whom the students nicknamed “Bull.” An exacting teacher, he was assiduously devoted to his academic duties at Columbia College, rarely leaving his native city. Intensely reclusive, he never married and seldom even communicated with other scholars in his field....
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Anthon, Charles (1797-1867), professor of Greek and Latin
Meyer Reinhold
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Bonner, Robert Johnson (1868-1946), classical scholar
Michael Gagarin
Bonner, Robert Johnson (24 October 1868–23 January 1946), classical scholar, was born in New Hamburg, Ontario, Canada, the son of John Bonner and Nancy Turnbull. After graduating with honors in classics from the University of Toronto (1890) and taking a law degree from Ontario Law School (1893), he joined the Ontario bar. In 1894 he married Annie Wilson, with whom he had three children. The following year his preference for the classics and a life of teaching led him to accept a position as classical master at the Collegiate Institute in Collingswood, Ontario. He remained there until 1899, when he began graduate work in Greek at the University of Chicago under ...
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Bonner, Campbell (1876-1954), classical scholar
William M. Calder
Bonner, Campbell (30 January 1876–12 July 1954), classical scholar, was born in Nashville, Tennessee, the son of Willis Bonner, a judge, and Frances Campbell. He earned an A.B. at Vanderbilt in 1896 and an A.M. there the next year. He took a second A.M. at Harvard in 1898 and a Ph.D. there in 1900 with a dissertation ...
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Bundy, Elroy Lorraine (1920-1975), professor of classics
Hugh Parry
Bundy, Elroy Lorraine (1920–1975), professor of classics, was born in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, the son of Arthur C. Bundy, a farmer, and Sybil F. Tarkett, a seamstress. His family soon after moved to Duluth, where Bundy’s father found intermittent employment as a security guard and county sheriff while also serving as a lay minister of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Bundy always attributed his intellect to his father, his artistic skills to his mother. In 1942 military service took him to California, where he returned four years later to enroll at the University of California at Berkeley. There he soon changed his major from English, which he had chosen as the best preparation for a career as a poet, to classics, finding the ancient poets particularly challenging and stimulating. He received his B.A. in 1948 and then spent a year at Princeton on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. He taught briefly at the University of Washington (1952–1953) before being appointed to the Department of Classics at Berkeley in 1953. He received his Ph.D. in classics there in 1954 and remained on the faculty until his death....
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Calhoun, George Miller (1886-1942), classical scholar
Michael Gagarin
Calhoun, George Miller (29 January 1886–15 June 1942), classical scholar, was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, the son of James Duncan Calhoun, a newspaper editor and publisher, and Odus Marcella Alderman. The family’s southern roots led Calhoun to J. B. Stetson University in Florida, from which he graduated in 1906. He then went to the University of Chicago to work with ...
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Capps, Edward (1866-1950), classical scholar and administrator
William M. Calder
Capps, Edward (21 December 1866–21 August 1950), classical scholar and administrator, was born in Jacksonville, Illinois, the son of Stephen Reid Capps and Rhoda Smith Tomlin. His father was a successful manufacturer and philanthropist. He received his B.A. in 1887 from Illinois College, Jacksonville, where Edward B. Clapp won him over to the study of classics. He earned his Ph.D. from Yale in 1891 with an outstanding dissertation on the stage in the ancient Greek theater. At Yale he met ...
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Carter, Jesse Benedict (1872-1917), educator and classical scholar
L. Richardson Jr.
Carter, Jesse Benedict (16 June 1872–20 July 1917), educator and classical scholar, was born in New York City, the son of Peter Carter, a publisher, and Mary Louise Benedict. He entered New York University in 1889 but after a year transferred to Princeton, where his studies gravitated toward literature and the arts but especially classical studies. He graduated at the top of his class in 1893. He then went to Germany, where the best training for a career as a classicist was to be found, and studied for a year at Leipzig (1893–1894) and a year at Berlin and Göttingen (1894–1895). He then returned to Princeton, where he was an instructor in Latin for two years (1895–1897), and then returned to Germany for a year to take his Ph.D. at Halle in 1898. At Halle he was a pupil of the great German student of Roman religion, Georg Wissowa, whose influence permeated his work for the rest of his life. His dissertation ...
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Cherniss, Harold Fredrik (1904-1987), classicist and educator
Domokos Hajdo
Cherniss, Harold Fredrik (11 March 1904–18 June 1987), classicist and educator, was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, the son of David Benjamin, a health inspector, and Theresa Hart. In 1921 Cherniss entered the University of California at Los Angeles and transferred to the Berkeley campus after one semester. In 1925 he graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with an A.B. and highest honors in Greek and political science. He remained at Berkeley for his graduate studies and, in 1929, received his Ph.D. in Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. Among his mentors at Berkeley was Roger Miller Jones, who inspired Cherniss’s passion for Greek philosophy, and for Plutarch in particular. While a graduate student, Cherniss also studied at the University of Chicago, in the summer of 1926; the University of Göttingen, in 1927; and the University of Berlin, in 1928. He would later publish his doctoral dissertation, “The Platonism of Gregory of Nyssa” (1930). In 1929 he married Ruth Meyer of White Plains, New York. They had two daughters....
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Edelstein, Ludwig (1902-1965), classical scholar and historian of medicine
William M. Calder
Edelstein, Ludwig (23 April 1902–16 August 1965), classical scholar and historian of medicine, was born in Berlin, Germany, the son of Isidor Edelstein, a wealthy Jewish businessman, and Mathilde Adler. Taught first by private tutors, Ludwig Edelstein later entered the Joachim Friedrich Humanistic Gymnasium in Berlin, where he received grounding in Greek and Latin. He studied from 1921 to 1924 at the Friedrich-Wilhelms University in his native city. From the start he concentrated in philosophy and classics and was especially influenced by the classicist ...
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Felton, Cornelius Conway (1807-1862), professor of Greek and twentieth president of Harvard
Meyer Reinhold
Felton, Cornelius Conway (06 November 1807–26 February 1862), professor of Greek and twentieth president of Harvard, was born at West Newbury, Massachusetts, the son of Cornelius Conway Felton and Anna Morse. Rising out of the keen poverty of his family, Felton became one of the most influential leaders in the reforming of classical education and learning in America between 1830 and 1860. During his undergraduate years at Harvard (1823–1827) he worked to support himself, and after graduation (A.B., 1827) he taught for two years at Livingston County High School in Geneseo, New York. Appointed Latin tutor (1829) and Greek tutor (1830) at Harvard, he rose rapidly to the rank of professor of Greek (1832). In 1834, at the age of twenty-seven, he was chosen Eliot Professor of Greek Language and Literature, a post he filled with high distinction until he was elected president of Harvard in 1860....
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Fränkel, Hermann Ferdinand (1888-1977), classical scholar
William M. Calder
Fränkel, Hermann Ferdinand (07 May 1888–08 April 1977), classical scholar, was born in Berlin, Germany, the son of Maximilian Fränkel, an archaeologist, epigraphist, and librarian, and Johanna Benary, daughter of Berlin orientalist Ferdinand Benary. Fränkel studied classical philology at the universities in Bonn, Berlin, and Göttingen. Among his teachers were the greatest scholars in the history of the discipline: the Hellenists Max Pohlenz and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, a friend and correspondent of his father, and the Latinists Franz Buecheler and Friedrich Leo. Fränkel’s Göttingen dissertation of 1915 on the Hellenistic poet Simias of Rhodes remains authoritative. That year he married Lilli Fraenkel, the sister of his brilliant fellow student Eduard Fraenkel (not related), who would later transform Oxford classics. Fränkel and his wife had one child. In 1921, after four years of military service in World War I, Fränkel published his Göttingen Habilitationsschrift on the similes of Homer. The study emphasized the content of the simile rather than the point of comparison and so deepened understanding of the Homeric poems that Kurt Riezler in 1936 argued the origin of Greek philosophy from the Homeric simile. But most German philologists with the singular exception of Wilamowitz considered the book overly subtle and therefore unconvincing. Fränkel became Privatdozent in classical philology at Göttingen in 1920, assistant in 1923, and Extraordinarius (associate professor) there in 1925. Despite Wilamowitz’s support, however, Fränkel never was offered a chair at a German university, although in 1922 he was granted a research fellowship at the German Archaeological Institute in Athens. Fränkel’s greatest student, Bruno Snell, called this neglect a scandal....
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Friedländer, Paul (1882-1968), classicist
William M. Calder
Friedländer, Paul (21 March 1882–10 December 1968), classicist, was born in Berlin, the son of Maximilian Friedländer, a businessman, and Clara Schidlower. He attended school at the Friedrichs-Gymnasium and in 1900 began study at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, both in his native city. There he first met his mentor and patron, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, the greatest Hellenist of modern times. He studied for two semesters in 1902 at Bonn under the Latinist Franz Buecheler and the Hellenist and historian of religion Hermann Usener as well as the archaeologist Georg Loeschcke. He hesitated between archaeology and philology, dedicating his Berlin dissertation, ...
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Gildersleeve, Basil Lanneau (1831-1924), classicist and founding editor of the American Journal of Philology
Ward W. Briggs
Gildersleeve, Basil Lanneau (23 October 1831–09 January 1924), classicist and founding editor of the American Journal of Philology, classicist and founding editor of the American Journal of Philology, was born in Charleston, South Carolina, the son of the Reverend Benjamin Gildersleeve, editor of religious newspapers, and Emma Louisa Lanneau. Born at the height of Charleston’s eminence in American life, Gildersleeve, who could read Greek at age five, led his life according to values of independence, high culture, and regionalism that he felt were shared by ancient Greece and the old South....
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Goodwin, William Watson (1831-1912), Eliot professor of Greek at Harvard
Ward W. Briggs
Goodwin, William Watson (09 May 1831–15 June 1912), Eliot professor of Greek at Harvard, was born in Concord, Massachusetts, the son of Hersey Bradford Goodwin, a Unitarian minister, and Lucretia Ann Watson, both of old and prominent families. His parents died when he was an infant, and he was raised in Plymouth by his grandmother, Lucretia Burr Sturges Watson. He credited his uncle, Benjamin Marston Watson, with teaching him Greek. He graduated from Harvard in 1851, received his Ph.D. from Göttingen in 1855 (where three of the first five Eliot professors of Greek studied), returned to become tutor in Greek and Latin (1856–1857), tutor in Greek (1857–1860), Eliot professor until his retirement, and emeritus (1901–1912)....
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Hadas, Moses (1900-1966), scholar and educator
Robert L. Gale
Hadas, Moses (25 June 1900–17 August 1966), scholar and educator, was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of David Hadas and Gertrude Draizen, Russian-Jewish immigrants. His father was a shopkeeper, a scholar, and a writer in Hebrew and Latin on the rabbinical exegesis of the Pentateuch. After studying Greek and Latin at Boys High School in Atlanta, Hadas earned his B.A. at Emory University in 1922 and his M.A. in classics at Columbia University in 1925. For scholarly, not theological, reasons, he began study in 1922 at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and received a rabbinical degree in 1926. He taught for two years at the University of Cincinnati (1926–1928), after which he returned to Columbia and earned his Ph.D. in 1930. His dissertation, ...
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Hahn, E. Adelaide (1893-1967), classicist, philologist, and linguist
Julia S. Falk
Hahn, E. Adelaide (01 April 1893–08 July 1967), classicist, philologist, and linguist, was born in New York City, the daughter of Otto Hahn, occupation unknown, and Eleonore Funk Hahn, a teacher. Hahn never used her first name and left no written record of what the first initial stood for. She was home-schooled by her mother until she was thirteen years old, when she was sent to the elementary school run by Hunter College so that she could become accustomed to the ways of a classroom. This began her lifelong affiliation with Hunter, following in the footsteps of her mother, a Hunter graduate and editor of the college's ...
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Hamilton, Edith (1867-1963), author, educator, and classicist
Judith P. Hallett
Hamilton, Edith (12 August 1867–31 May 1963), author, educator, and classicist, was born in Dresden, Germany, the daughter of Montgomery Hamilton and Gertrude Pond. Her father’s wealthy and cultured family, prominent citizens of Fort Wayne, Indiana, had sent him to study in Europe in 1863 after he left Princeton University and served briefly in the Union army. There Montgomery Hamilton met and married Gertrude Pond, daughter of a New York sugar importer and Confederate sympathizer who had relocated his family abroad during the Civil War....
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Highet, Gilbert (1906-1978), classicist and critic
Thomas A. Suits
Highet, Gilbert (22 June 1906–20 January 1978), classicist and critic, was born Gilbert Arthur Highet in Glasgow, Scotland, the son of Gilbert Highet, a superintendent of telegraphs, and Elizabeth Boyle. He matriculated at Glasgow University in 1925, receiving a B.A. with highest honors in Greek and Latin (1928) and an M.A. (1929). From Glasgow he went up as Snell Exhibitioner to Balliol College, Oxford. At Oxford he was strongly influenced by three distinguished classicists, Gilbert Murray, C. M. Bowra, and Cyril Bailey. Here, as at Glasgow, he demonstrated the range of his interests by publishing poetry, fiction, and reviews in university literary magazines and was also active in experimental theater. He took the Oxford B.A. with a double first in classics in 1932....
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Jaeger, Werner Wilhelm (1888-1961), classical scholar and humanist
Robert Renehan
Jaeger, Werner Wilhelm (30 July 1888–19 October 1961), classical scholar and humanist, was born at Lobberich, a small German town in the lower Rhineland, the only child of Lutheran parents, Karl August Jaeger, a textile merchant, and Helene Birschel. One of the giants of twentieth-century classical scholarship, Jaeger, after one semester of study at the University of Marburg (1907), transferred to the University of Berlin at the age of nineteen. At Berlin he studied under some of the most famous classicists of the time, including Hermann Diels and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. Jaeger’s dissertation on Aristotle was published in two parts, ...
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Johnson, Allan Chester (1881-1955), university teacher
Edward Champlin
Johnson, Allan Chester (11 August 1881–02 March 1955), university teacher, was born in Loch Broom, Nova Scotia, Canada, the son of Leander Johnson and Hannah Creelman. His parents’ occupations are unknown. Johnson took his A.B. in classics at Dalhousie University in Halifax in 1904, and his Ph.D. at the Johns Hopkins University in 1909, under the supervision of ...
