Grant Showerman

Background

Grant Showerman was born on January 9, 1870 on a farm in Brookfield, Wisconsin, the second son of Hiram and Ellen Augusta (Parker) Showerman.

Education

After a year at Carroll College he entered the University of Wisconsin in 1893 and received the degree of A. B. in 1896, having made a brilliant record in scholarship and literary activities. For two years he remained as fellow in classics. He then won a fellowship for two years of study at the American School of Classical Studies in Rome.

Upon his return from Rome he received the degree of Ph. D. at the University of Wisconsin, his published thesis being entitled The Great Mother of the Gods (1901).

Career

For the rest of his life he served the university as a teacher, except for one year during which he taught at Princeton and four years when he took leaves of absence for further study and teaching at the American Academy in Rome. In 1922-23 he was annual professor at the American Academy and from 1923 to 1932 he directed its summer session.

Both of his children, John Parker and Anita, were graduated from the University of Wisconsin. His wife and daughter survived him at the time of his death in Madison. As he himself declared, Rome was his second home. He steeped himself in its history, literature, and art, from the earliest times down to the twentieth century. The result of his research appeared in his books, Eternal Rome (1924), Rome and the Romans (1931), and Monuments and Men of Ancient Rome (1935).

He also communicated his knowledge and quiet enthusiasm to scores of teachers of Latin who studied under him during the ten summers he spent in Italy and adjoining sites of the classical world. In recognition of this work the Italian Government conferred on him in 1929 the honor of Cavaliere della Corona d'Italia.

In addition to his study of Rome, Showerman prepared the volume of Ovid's Heroides and Amores (1914) for the Loeb Classical Library, wrote Horace and His Influence (1922) for the series Our Debt to Greece and Rome, edited, with J. W. Cunliffe, Century Readings in Ancient Classical and Modern European Literature (1925), contributed articles, including those on Attis and Cybele, to J. M. Hastings's Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics and on Attis and syncretism to the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, and published The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism (1911), a translation of the work of Franz Cumont.

His love of the modest life of his boyhood is revealed in his books, A Country Chronicle (1916) and A Country Child (1917); but ambition led the country boy to ally himself with the cosmopolitan experience of Roman and post-Roman Italy. If he was generally engaged in quiet pursuits, he also relished breaking lances fiercely against what he regarded as educational fads, such as the Experimental College of his own university.

Achievements

• He was a determined exponent of classical culture, in which the law and order of Rome appealed to him more than the freedom and variety of Greece; yet he was an authority on the orgiastic worship of the Asiatic Great Mother of the Gods. To his friends, as well as to the principles which he cherished, he was profoundly loyal. Showerman House in Kronshage Hall is named after him.

Works

More photos

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  • The Indian Stream republic and Luther Parker

    (CHAPTER 1 Ancestry and Early Years Luther Parker, the f...)

  • Heroides and Amores

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • A Country Child

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Our Debt to Greece and Rome. Horace and His Influence

    (Leopold is delighted to publish this classic book as part...)

  • With the Professor

    (Leopold is delighted to publish this classic book as part...)

  • Horace and His Influence

    (This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 19...)

  • Horace and His Influence

    (Horace and His Influence is presented here in a high qual...)

  • Horace and Thackeray

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

  • book

Personality

He was not, and never wished to be, a specialist within any narrow field. His range of interests was too extensive, his delight in teaching and popular lecturing too great, and his sense of a moral mission too demanding, for him to become an authority of first importance in any single subject, except possibly the one on which he concentrated more than upon any other, the religion of Cybele. His writing was rather that of a conscientious humanist, with a talent for graceful expression.

Deploring "useless specialism on the one hand and loose inexactness on the other, " he followed his master, Cicero, in considering the moral influence of his work quite as important as its intellectual discipline. He was impatient of the shortcomings of his students, and considered it his duty to hold them up to the most exacting standards. Toward earnest and faithful pupils he showed unfailing sympathy.

At first impression he seemed to be of a retiring disposition, a busy little man with rather sad eyes and a tired voice, buried in his library or engrossed in his writing and his teaching, meeting constant ill health with stoical dignity. But his appearance did not do justice to his paradoxical nature. Although his extreme sensitiveness made him shy and at times depressed, he was very positive in his convictions, and his combative spirit was only partially tempered by tolerant humor.

Connections

On August 10, 1899, he married Zilpha Marie Vernon of Madison, Wisconsin.

Father:

Hiram Showerman

Mother:

Ellen Augusta Parker

Spouse:

Zilpha Marie Vernon