All Scholars
RADFORD, Robert Somerville
- Date of Birth: January 31, 1869
- Born City: Forest
- Born State/Country: VA
- Parents: Munford Washington & Laura Somerville R.
- Date of Death: November 07, 1936
- Death City: Gambier
- Death State/Country: OH
- Education:
Ph.B. U. Virginia, 1889; Ph.D., 1891; Ph.D. Johns Hopkins, 1895; study at Berlin, 1898-1900.
- Dissertation:
"On Latin Strong Tenses and Modes. A Treatise on Temporal and Modal Significance in the Latin Indirect Discourse" (Virginia, 1891); printed (Charlottesville, 1891); "Personification and the Use of Abstract Subjects in the Attic Orators and Thukydides" (Johns Hopkins, 1895); printed (Baltimore, 1901).
- Professional Experience:
Instr. Lat. & Gk. U. Virginia, 1888-92; instr. Lat. Acad. Northwestern U., 1896-7; prof. Lat. Washburn Coll., 1897-9; asso. Lat. lit. Bryn Mawr, 1899-1901; prof. Lat. & Rom. arch. Elmira Coll., 1901-8; prof. Lat. & class, arch. U. Tennessee, 1908-24; prof. Gk. Kenyon Coll., 1924-36.
- Publications:
"The Latin Monosyllables in their Relation to Accent and Quantity. A Study in the Verse of Terence," TAPA 34 (1903) 60-103; "Studies in Latin Accent and Metric," TAPA 35 (1904) 33-64; "Plautine Synizesis: A Study of the Phenomena of brevis coalescens," TAPA 36 (1905) 158-210; "The Prosody of Ille. A Study of the Anomalies of Roman Quantity," AJP 27 (1906) 418-37; 28 (1907) 11-33; "Contraction in the Case-Forms of Deus and meus, is and idem," AJP 29 (1908) 336-41; "On the Recession of the Latin Accent in Connection with Monosyllabic Words and the Traditional Word-Order," AJP 25 (1914) 147-62, 256-73, 406-27; "The Juvenile Works of Ovid and the Spondaic Period of his Metrical Art," TAPA 51 (1920) 146-71; "The Priapea and the Vergilian Appendix," TAPA 52 (1921) 148-77; "Tibullus and Ovid: The Authorship of the Sulpicia and Cornutus Elegies in the Tibullan Corpus," AJP 44 (1923) 1-26, 230-59, 293-318; "The Language of the Pseudo-Vergilian Catalepton with Especial Reference to its Ovidian Characteristics," TAPA 54 (1923) 168-86; "The Ovidian Authorship of the Lyg-damus Elegies," TAPA 57 (1926) 149-80.
- Notes:
Radford, a young Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, rose from the audience of the 1892 APA meeting to challenge a point made by W. G. Hale. Hale did not respond, but Gildersleeve defended him so impressively that Radford enrolled at Johns Hopkins to take a second Ph.D. His first and abiding love was Latin, but he chose a Greek topic for his dissertation so that he might write under Gildersleeve. He completed his second degree, spent two years in Germany, and returned to make a career that placed him on campuses without a research library or the incentive to publish. Nevertheless he regularly contributed articles of precise erudition and clear argumentation on grammar and authorship for the remainder of his career. Devoted to his younger sister and others in his family, he never married.
- Sources:
Kenyon Collegian 63,8 (10 Nov. 1936); WhAm 1:1006.
- Author: Ward W. Briggs, Jr.