North American Scholar

PHILLIPS, Henry, Jr

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  • Date of Birth (YYYY-MM-DD): 1903-07-10
  • Born City: Syracuse
  • Born State/Country: NY
  • Parents: Henry, an insurance agent, & Martha Keefe P.
  • Date of Death (YYYY-MM-DD): 1990-10-29
  • Death City: Portsmouth
  • Death State/Country: NH
  • Married: Katharine MacArthur Harris, 8 Aug. 1933.
  • Education:

    B.A. Amherst, 1926; A.M. Harvard, 1930; Ph.D., 1933; hon. A.M. Amherst, 1951.
  • Professional Experience:

    Lat. tchr. Lawrenceville Sch., 1926-7; instr. Lat. Amherst, 1927-8; instr. Lat., Gk., & hist. Phillips Exeter Acad., 1933-69; Bradbury Cilley Longfellow prof. Gk., 1939-69; chair dept. Gk., 1939-69; chair Exeter Pub. Sch. Survey, 1944; chair Legis. Comm. to Study Pub. Educ. in NH, 1945-6.
  • Dissertation:

    "De vocis ἀμαρτία vi et usu apud scriptores Graecos usque ad annum CCC ante Christum natum" (Harvard, 1933).
  • Publications:

    A New Introduction to Greek, with Alston Hurd Chase (Cambridge, 1949); A New Greek Reader, with Alston Hurd Chase (Cambridge, 1954).
  • Notes:

    Somewhere, long ago, I read a dedication of a book which read "In Memory of a Friendship which Survived a Collaboration." The half-century friendship between Henry Phillips and me was in no sense a "survival," for its placid waters were never troubled. In the whole course of writing and publishing the Introduction and the Reader, I can recall only one disagreement and that by no means acrimonious and very easily solved. One day we were invited to meet at Harvard with Professor Carl Newell Jackson, the greatly gifted teacher whose Greek 1 class had inspired me to major in the classics. He told us that he had always planned to write a beginner's book but now realized that he would never do it. So he had chosen us to carry out the project. He presented us with his scheme of lessons and dismissed us with his blessing. The revolutionary character of the book lay in its very early introduction of the "-μι" verbs, some half-dozen highly irregular verbs which are vital for the reading of any Greek author since they and their compounds are omnipresent. Traditional texts postpone them to the last because of their irregularity, and this means that all reading until then must be "made" Greek; with our text, the student could early begin to read "real" Greek. It happened that Henry had for several years been collecting short passages suited to such use. So, in the division of labors, Henry produced the readings and I wrote the sections on grammar and the review sentences, but each went over the other's work for needed corrections and suggestions. So Chase and Phillips was born.
  • Sources:

    Personal knowledge.
  • Author: Alston Hurd Chase