Samuel Eliot Bassett

Samuel Eliot Bassett (born August 11, 1873 in Wilton, Connecticut , † December 21, 1936 in Burlington, Vermont ) was an American classical philologist .

Life

Samuel Eliot Bassett, the son of a doctor, studied at Yale University ( BA 1898) and then went on several years of educational and research trips through Europe. He deepened his studies at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA) and at the universities of Berlin and Freiburg . After a year as a Fellow at ASCSA (1901/1902) he returned to Yale and wrote his doctoral thesis with Thomas Day Seymour (1848-1907).

Immediately after his doctorate (1905) Bassett was appointed Professor of Greek at the University of Vermont , where he taught and researched for the rest of his life. Although chronic illness had made his work difficult since 1915, he published over 100 articles in American and English magazines. For the year 1923/1924 he was elected President of the American Philological Association , for the year 1931/1932 as a visiting professor at the ASCSA . For the year 1936/1937 he was invited as a Sather Professor at the University of Berkeley . However, he died before taking up his professorship on December 21, 1936. His already elaborated series of lectures was published posthumously .

Bassett's main research interests were the Homeric epics, the style and metrics of which he has been studying since his studies. Like most American philologists, as a Unitarian, he took the position that Homer was the poet of both the Iliad and the Odyssey . Unlike the analysts , according to whom the numerous contradictions in the epics prove their compilation from several individual epics, Bassett emphasized the successful composition of the Iliad and Odyssey . In his posthumous work Poetry of Homer, he put forward various theses on Homer's compositional principles and opposed applying modern standards to the epics.

Fonts (selection)

• Poetry of Homer . Berkeley 1938 ( Sather Classical Lectures 15). New edition with an introduction by Bruce Heiden . Lanham (MD) 2003. ISBN 0-7391-0696-1
  • Review by Ruth Scodel , BMCR 2003-12-18

literature

• Ward W. Briggs : Bassett, Samuel Eliot . In: Derselbe (ed.), Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists , Westport, CT / London: Greenwood Press 1994, ISBN 978-0-313245-60-2 , pp. 35f.

Web links

• Entry on Samuel Eliot Bassett in the Database of Classical Scholars (English)