Elmer Truesdell Merrill

Background

Elmer Truesdell Merrill was born on January 1, 1860, in Millville, Massachusetts. He was the oldest child of the Rev. Charles Atwood Merrill and his second wife, Mary Truesdell. His father was a Methodist minister; his mother, a former school teacher, was a woman of great force of character with a keen interest in books and high ideals of education. With five children in the family, despite a limited ministerial income, the parents sent two sons to college.

Education

Merrill graduated from the high school in Woburn, Massachusetts, and went on to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where he was awarded the B. A. degree in 1881 with general honors, first grade, and special honors in Latin and Greek. He continued his studies at Wesleyan, 1881-82, at Yale, 1885-86, and at the University of Berlin, 1886-87. Among the strongest influences upon his work as a classicist he counted his association with Prof. William D. Whitney at Yale and his study in Berlin. In 1889 he received the M. A. degree at Wesleyan. His eminence as a scholar was subsequently recognized in the award of honorary degrees by St. Andrews University (Scotland), Kenyon College(Gambier, Ohio), Wesleyan, and Trinity College (Hartford, Connecticut).

Career

Merrill served as president of the American Philological Association for the year 1905-06. Merrill's teaching left its imprint on institutions covering the breadth of the United States, but his two chief positions were at Wesleyan, where he was Robert Rich Professor of Latin Language and Literature, 1888-1905, and at the University of Chicago, where he was professor of Latin from 1908 until his retirement to Santa Barbara, California, in 1925. From 1905 to 1908 he taught at Trinity College. He was a member of the editorial board of Classical Philology from 1906 until his death, and he was long connected with the School of Classical Studies in the American Academy in Rome, where he served as a professor in 1898-99. With his work in classical studies, Merrill combined an interest in church history and in the work of the Protestant Episcopal Church. He was confirmed in the church by Bishop John Williams in 1891, ordained deacon in 1894, and priest in 1895. His main interest, however, lay in teaching and scholarship, and he never assumed the regular charge of a parish, although while a professor at the University of Chicago he was assistant priest at the nearby Church of the Redeemer. His interest in religion found expression in many articles on Roman and Christian religion and particularly in his Essays in Early Christian History (1924). In these studies, as both a professed classicist and a professed Christian, he discussed, without regard to their possible religious connotations, various topics connected with early Christian history, applying the same methodological principles that he used in the investigation of other matters in his historical field. The book was acclaimed by churchmen and others as an important and definitive contribution to the history of the early persecutions. In the classical field, Merrill was the author of many studies on a variety of topics ranging from his Fragments of Roman Satire from Ennius to Apuleius (1897) to notes on the teaching of Latin. But he was best known for his work on Catullus and the younger Pliny. He died of cerebral thrombosis in Santa Barbara, California, and was buried in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Achievements

• Merrill is primarily remembered for his student edition of the Roman poet Catullus and for his studies on the text and tradition of the Letters of Pliny the Younger, culminating in his 1914 Teubner edition, which constituted an important basis for the works of later scholars.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Selected Letters of the Younger Pliny (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Selected Letters of the Younger Pliny The t...)

  • Catullus; Edited by Elmer Truesdell Merrill

    (Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)

  • Fragments of Roman Satire from Ennius to Apuleius

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

  • Catullus

    (Catullus works in Latin a text book edition)

  • The Morgan Fragment of Pliny's Letters: Classical Philology, V18, No. 2, April, 1923

Personality

Merrill was a man of commanding and austere presence, but beneath a somewhat forbidding exterior, there were great kindliness and sympathy, which showed especially in the mellowness of his later years. Students did not find him readily approachable, but those who came to know him and who sat with him in his exquisite library recognized his immense erudition and revealed in his inimitable and instructive stories. He was widely read in Latin literature and had broad general interests and highly discriminating tastes. His classes regularly led to discussions of things widely separated from the course and yet oddly relevant to the matter in hand. Rigid and uncompromising in his standards both for himself and for others, he was full of provocative ideas and greatly stimulated the development of original thinking and investigation.

Connections

On June 19, 1890, Merrill was married to Edith Valentine of Glendale, California. They had three children, Doris, Robert Valentine, and Cedric Valentine.

Father:

Charles Atwood Merrill

Mother:

Mary Truesdell

Wife:

Edith Valentine

Daughter:

Doris Merrill

Son:

Cedric Valentine Merrill

Son:

Robert Valentine Merrill