Samuel Eliot Bassett
Samuel Eliot Bassett (11 August 1873 – 21 December 1936) was an American classical philologist.
Contents
Biography
Samuel Eliot Bassett was born in Wilton, Connecticut, the son of a doctor. He studied at Yale University (B.A. 1898) and then undertook 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 under Thomas Day Seymour (1848–1907).
Immediately after receiving 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 a chronic illness had hampered his work since 1915, he published over 100 articles in American and English journals. For the year 1923/1924 he was elected president of the American Philological Association, for the year 1931/1932 visiting professor at ASCSA. For the year 1936/1937 he was invited to University of California as Sather Professor. However, he died before taking up the professorship on 21 December 1936. His already elaborated series of lectures was published posthumously.
Bassett's main research focus was the Homeric epics, whose style and metrics he had been studying since his undergraduate days. Like most American philologists at the time, he held the Unitarian view 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 emphasised 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 argued against applying modern standards to the epics.
Works
- Poetry of Homer (1938; 2003)
References
- Briggs, Ward W. (1994). "Bassett, Samuel Eliot". In: Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists. Westport, CT/London: Greenwood Press, pp. 35–36.
