14 - Basil L. Gildersleeve: The Formative Influence

Summary

It is generally held that Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve was the most important and influential classicist in America. What are his claims to such prominence? First, few have been formative figures in American education for longer than he, since he enjoyed a teaching career of sixty-five years. Second, was our most literary classicist at the same time that he was our most scrupulous and masterly grammarian, and he appeals to us today at least as much in the noble humanity of his style as in the humbling regality of his learning. At the time of his death, he could claim pervasive influence in his own land. His edition of Pindar's Olympian and Pythian Odes was recognized as a standard commentary on these poems of the most vexatious classical poet. His Latin Grammar was still in print and widely used. The journal he founded, The American Journal of Philology, continued to hold first rank among international classics journals and to attract the best contributors from this country and Europe. It is the more remarkable that each of these statements remains true today, some sixty-five years after his death.

To discuss Gildersleeve's formative influence on American scholarship and teaching, it is necessary to discuss the influences that formed him, sketching out a portion of his intellectual biography.