Tuesday, January 10, 2023
Now You Have Touched Greatness
Ward W. Briggs, "B.L. Gildersleeve and 'The American Journal of Philology',"
Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Supplement, No. 128: Classics "In
Practice": Studies in the History of Scholarship (2015) 3-15 (at 4, on William Watson Goodwin):
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At the age of twenty-eight Goodwin produced the first book-length work of American classical scholarship, The syntax of the moods and tenses of the Greek verb (1859). This was a thoroughly American production, free of the conflicting linguistic theories that divided the European classical community. Such was the European reputation of Goodwin's book that the great scholar of the Attic orators Friedrich Blass (1843-1907) would call his students into his office, hand them his copy of Goodwin's Syntax, and when they handed it back, Blass would say, 'Now you have touched greatness'.10
10 William M. Calder III, 'Die Geschichte der klassischen Philologie in den Vereinigten Staaten', Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien 11 (1966) 221 = Studies in the modern history of classical scholarship (Napoli 1985) 23.
