All Scholars
SCOTT, John Adams
- Date of Birth: September 15, 1867
- Born City: Fletcher
- Born State/Country: IL
- Date of Death: October 27, 1947
- Death City: Augusta
- Death State/Country: MI
- Married: Mathilda Jane Spring, 1 Sept. 1892.
- Education:
A.B. Northwestern, 1891; Ph.D. Johns Hopkins, 1897; study at Göttingen, Munich; LL.D. Illinois Coll. (Jacksonville, IL), 1916.
- Dissertation:
"A Comparative Study of Hesiod and Pindar" (Johns Hopkins, 1897); printed (Chicago, 1898).
- Professional Experience:
Instr. to prof. Gk. Northwestern, 1897-1904; head prof., 1904-23; John C. Shaffer prof. Gk., 1923-38; asso. ed. CJ, 1909-33; pres. CAMWS, 1916-7; pres. APA, 1918-9; Sather prof., 1920-1; councillor ASCSA, 1926-7.
- Publications:
"A Tragic Fragment of Ion," Studies Gildersleeve, 481-2; "The Vocative in Homer and Hesiod," AJP 24 (1903) 192-6; "The Vocative in Aeschylus and Sophocles," AJP 25 (1904) 81-4; "Additional Notes on the [Greek] Vocative," AJP 26 (1905) 32-43; "Prohibitives with πρός and the Genitive," CP 2 (1907) 324-30; "Sigmatism in Greek Dramatic Poetry," AJP 29 (1908) 69-77; "The Influence of Meter on the Homeric Choice of Disyllables," CP 4 (1909) 248-55; "Effect of Sigmatism as Shown in Homer," AJP 30 (1909) 72-7; "Odyssean Words Found in But One Book of the Iliad,” CP 5 (1910) 41-9; "Words found in the Iliad and in But One Book of the Odyssey" CP 6 (1911) 48-55; "Two Linguistic Tests of the Relative Ambiguity of the Iliad and the Odyssey," CP 6 (1911) 156-62; "Athenian Interpolations in Homer," CP 6 (1911) 419-28; "Repeated Verses in Homer," AJP 32 (1911) 313-21; "Patronymics as a Test of the Relative Age of Homeric Books," CP 7 (1912) 293-301; "Phoenix in the Iliad," AJP 33 (1912) 68-77; "Two Homeric Personages," AJP 35 (1914) 309-25; The Unity of Homer, Sather Lectures (Berkeley, 1921); The Poetic Structure of the Odyssey, Martin Class. Lectures (Cambridge, 1931); Homer and His Influence, Our Debt to Greece and Rome (Boston, 1925); Socrates and Christ (Evanston, IL, 1929); "Plural Verbs with Neuter Plural Subjects in Homer," AJP 50 (1929) 71-6; Luke, Greek Physician and Historian (Evanston, IL, 1930); We Would Know Jesus (New York, 1936); "The First Book of the Odyssey," TAPA 67 (1936) 1-6; "The Forbidden Diaeresis in Homer," CP 39 (1944) 112-3; "Homer and Hector," AJP 66 (1945) 187-9.
- Notes:
John Adams Scott wrote his dissertation under Basil L. Gildersleeve and shaped the development of the Classics Department of his alma mater, Northwestern University. Partly under the influence of Paul Shorey of the nearby University of Chicago, but also driven by parallel issues raised by his profound belief in the inerrancy of the Bible, Scott devoted his scholarly career to a series of detailed critiques of German Homeric analysis (mainly published in Shorey's Classical Philology), which culminated in the first published Sather Lectures, The Unity of Homer. For some, "Scott's 'Unity of Homer' has been the most influential book in the whole Sather series" and "won the cause for Unitarianism a decade before Parry made it easy" (Sterling Dow). For others, Scott was "a skillful if unscrupulous controversialist" (E. R. Dodds), whose polemical Germanophobia cut off American classics from its German roots and stifled, perhaps forever, the development of significant research in classical philology in the United States.
- Sources:
S. E. Bassett, AJP 43 (1922) 177-81; Albert B. Lord, DAB Suppl. 4:728-9; Clyde Murley, CJ 43 (1947-8) 274, 298; NatCAB 35:221; WhAm 2:476.
- Author: E. Christian Kopff
