{"id":3148,"date":"2010-08-02T14:02:06","date_gmt":"2010-08-02T19:02:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/?p=3148"},"modified":"2010-08-03T11:26:17","modified_gmt":"2010-08-03T16:26:17","slug":"a-greek-professor-in-the-civil-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/2010\/08\/02\/a-greek-professor-in-the-civil-war\/","title":{"rendered":"A Greek Professor in the Civil War"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"\u201cThe war was a good time for the study of the conflict between Athens and Sparta,\u201d Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve (1831-1924) wrote in 1897.\u00a0 \u201cIt was a great time for reading and re-reading classical literature in general, for the South was blockaded against new books as effectively, almost, as Megara was blockaded against garlic and salt… The Southerner, always conservative in his tastes and no great admirer of American literature, which had become largely alien to him, went back to his English classics, his ancient classics.\u00a0 Old gentlemen past the military age furbished up their Latin and Greek.\u00a0 Some of them had never let their Latin and Greek grow rusty.\u201d<\/p>\n

Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and received his first schooling from his father, who was a Presbyterian clergyman and newspaper editor.\u00a0 Young Gildersleeve was reading ancient Greek fluently at the age of twelve, and at nineteen had graduated from Princeton (class of 1849) and had set off for G\u00f6ttingen, Germany, where he earned a doctorate in classical philology in 1853.\u00a0 He was a professor of Greek at the University of Virginia from 1856 until 1876, when he left to become the first professor of Greek at the new Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.\u00a0<\/p>\n

From 1861 to 1864, Gildersleeve served as a staff officer with General John B. Gordon<\/a>.\u00a0 A staunch supporter of the Confederacy, he also contributed regular wartime editorials to the Richmond Examiner, edited by John Moncure Daniel<\/a>,<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/em>which have been collected by Ward W. Briggs, Jr. in Soldier and Scholar: Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve and the Civil War <\/em>\u00a0(University Press of Virginia 1998).\u00a0 Gildersleeve\u2019s service with the Confederate army ended in September 1864, during the Valley Campaigns, when a bullet shattered his leg.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI lost my pocket Homer, I lost my pistol, I lost one of my horses and, finally, I came very near losing my life,\u201d he later wrote.\u00a0 General Gordon, in his memoirs, praised Gildersleeve\u2019s \u201ccourage and composure\u201d under fire, and Gildersleeve claimed that the general\u2019s praise meant more to him than any of the academic honors he had received.<\/p>\n

At Johns Hopkins after the war, Gildersleeve founded the prestigious American Journal of Philology<\/em>, wrote a Latin grammar that would become a standard for generations to come, and reflected on the Civil War in essays like \u201cThe Creed of the Old South,\u201d which promoted the idea of the Lost Cause<\/a>. (Writing about Demosthenes in the American Journal of Philology<\/em>\u00a0in 1906, Gildersleeve called the Greek orator “a champion of a lost cause,” and added, “some of us who have championed lost causes are not so enthusiastic about other people’s lost causes.”)\u00a0In \u201cA Southerner in the Peloponnesian War,\u201d quoted above, Gildersleeve reflects on the American Civil War in light of the Peloponnesian War, the conflict in the fifth century BCE between the northern Greek Athenians and the southern Greek Spartans.<\/p>\n

\u201cStates rights were not suffered to slumber,\u201d he wrote in that essay.\u00a0 \u201cThe Southerner resented Northern dictation as Pericles resented Lacedaimonian [i.e., Spartan] dictation, and our Peloponnesian War began.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

For more on Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve online, see\u00a0James Stimpert, \u201cHopkins History: First Greek Prof., Basil Gildersleeve,<\/a>\u201d The Johns Hopkins Gazette<\/em>, September 18, 2000; and\u00a0Michael Dirda, \u201cTo Understand Ourselves<\/a>,”\u00a0Johns Hopkins Magazine<\/em>, August 27, 2009. Both “The Creed of the Old South” and “A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War” can be read on Google Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe war was a good time for the study of the conflict between Athens and Sparta,\u201d Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve (1831-1924) wrote in 1897.\u00a0 \u201cIt was a great time for reading and re-reading classical literature in general, for the South was blockaded against new books as effectively, almost, as Megara was blockaded against garlic and salt… […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[78],"tags":[167],"class_list":["post-3148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-19th-century-1840-1880","tag-education-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3148"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3157,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3148\/revisions\/3157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}