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Gildersleeve the American classicist
Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in
October 1831, the son of the Rev. Benjamin Gildersleeve and the
former Emma Louisa Lanneau.1 When he was about fourteen years old, he moved
with his family to Richmond, Virginia, and lived there through the
Civil War. Gildersleeve went to Baltimore, Maryland, in 1876 as
professor of Greek at the Johns Hopkins University, which had just
been founded. He died in Baltimore in January 1924. Gildersleeve
married Elizabeth Fisher Colston in 1866; they had one son, Raleigh
Colston Gildersleeve (1869-1944), who became an architect.
Gildersleeve was educated at Princeton, from which he was graduated
in 1849, and Göttingen, where he received a Ph.D. in 1853.
He taught at the University of Virginia from 1856 to 1876, when he
was invited to join the faculty of Johns Hopkins, Daniel Coit
Gilman's new university on the German model.
The most important event of Gildersleeve's life, however, was surely
the Civil War. Gildersleeve served in the Confederate Army while
continuing to teach at Virginia. He saw combat, and was wounded at
Weyer's Cave, Virginia, in September 1864. As he puts it himself,
In that campaign I lost my
pocket Homer, I lost my pistol, I lost one of my horses, and
finally I came very near to losing my life by a wound which
kept me five months on my back.
("Formative Influences," Forum 10 (February
1891), 607-617; reprinted in Briggs 1998, 33-49; quotation p.
48-49.)
Throughout his life Gildersleeve identified himself as a Southerner.
In his 1892 essay "The Creed of the Old South," he insists that the
most important issue in the war was the sovereign rights of the
individual states. "The principle of States' rights was incarnate in
the historical life of the Southern people," he says (Briggs 1998 p. 377). Near
the end of the essay he explains: "That the cause we fought for and
our brothers died for was the cause of civil liberty, and not the
cause of human slavery, is a thesis which we feel ourselves bound to
maintain whenever our motives are challeged or misunderstood, if
only for our children's sake." (p. 388) Perhaps; certainly in the
newspaper editorials he wrote for the Richmond
Examiner during the war (collected in Briggs 1998), he
repeatedly attempted to defend or justify the "peculiar
institution."
Once the war was over, Gildersleeve returned to full-time teaching.
When Daniel Coit Gilman began recruiting faculty for a new
university, he offered Gildersleeve the position of professor of
Greek. Gildersleeve became the first member of the faculty of Johns
Hopkins, where classes began in the fall of 1876. He remained there
until he retired.
Although like most classicists Gildersleeve taught both Greek and
Latin, he was primarily a Hellenist. The commentary on Pindar's
Olympian and Pythian odes is one of his major works, published by
Harper and Brothers in 1885. Apparently it was not very profitable,
so there is no companion volume on the Nemean and Isthmian odes.
Gildersleeve wrote articles and reviews about Pindar throughought
his career; a full bibliography can be found in Briggs 1992
Gildersleeve's
Syntax of Classical Greek
is his other major contribution to Greek studies. In
addition he wrote a Latin grammar, a commentary on the Latin verse
satires of Persius, and many articles and reviews. His most lasting
legacy may be the journal he founded at Johns Hopkins, the
American Journal of Philology (AJP), still
considered one of the very best journals in the field.
Gildersleeve edited AJP for forty years, from 1880 to 1919. In the
early days "philology" was broadly construed; the first volume
includes articles and reviews on Sanskrit, German, French,
Indo-European, English, and Frisian, as well as Latin and Greek.
This was typical of the field; early issues of Transactions
and Proceedings of the American Philological Association
show a similarly broad range. By 1936, the journal's
self-description read "The American Journal of Philology is open to
original communications in all departments of philology, and
especially Greek and Latin studies" (AJP 57.1 (1936), inside front
cover); very few articles outside Greek or Latin were appearing in
its pages. In 1967 the focus narrowed again: "The American Journal
of Philology publishes original contributions in the field of
Greco-Roman antiquity, especially in the areas of philology,
literature, history, and philosophy" (AJP 88.1 (1967), inside front
cover). Although Gildersleeve's own contributions to the journal
were classical, under his editorship the journal covered all the
philological disciplines then studied in the US.
