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(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
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John Adams Scott was an American classical philologist, editor from Illinois. His research focus was the Homeric epics.
Background
John Adams was born on September 15, 1867 in Fletcher, Illinois, United States, a small town in McLean County. He was the first son of seven children born to James Sterling Scott and Henrietta P. (Sutton) Scott. His father, born in Nova Scotia, had worked in Boston for a while in the carriage-making shop managed by his brother John. Because of ill health, James Scott moved to the Midwest and became a farmer.
At a very early age, John Adams and his younger brother Walter Dill (later president of Northwestern University, 1920-1939) worked on their father's 120-acre farm, and by 1880 they were managing it almost completely.
Education
Scott's early education was provided by his older sister Louise, who tutored both him and Walter at home. He graduated from the high school section of the Illinois State Normal School at Normal, Illinois, in 1887 and entered Northwestern University, from which he graduated in 1895. During 1891-1892 he was also a graduate student at Northwestern University.
In 1893 he began graduate work in Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit at the Johns Hopkins University, where he held the university scholarship in Greek in 1895 and a fellowship in 1895-1896. He was a pupil of Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, who in 1885 had edited The Olympian and Pythian Odes of Pindar. Scott received his doctorate from Johns Hopkins in June 1897; his dissertation, "A Comparative Study of Hesiod and Pindar, " was published in 1898.
Career
From 1891-1893 John Adams Scott was instructor in Greek in the academy of Northwestern University.
He returned to Northwestern as an instructor (1897), became professor of Greek (1901), and in 1904 he was named chairman of the department of classical languages. With the exception of his dissertation, The Unity of Homer was his first book. From it stemmed Homer and His Influence (1925) and The Poetic Structure of the Odyssey, the Martin Classical Lectures, published in 1931.
His other three books were of a religious nature. They contained lectures given by Scott under the auspices of the John C. Shaffer Foundation of Northwestern for promotion of the appreciation of the life, character, teachings, and influence of Jesus: Socrates and Christ (1928), Luke, Greek Physician and Historian (1930), and We Would Know Jesus (1936). A similar theme is represented in his article entitled, "The Church's Debt to Homer, " in Classical Essays Presented to J. A. Kleist, edited by R. E. Arnold and published in 1946.
In 1923 Scott was named John C. Shaffer professor of Greek. He was editor of the Classical Journal and edited its notes from 1910-1933. From 1926-1927, Scott was councillor to the American School in Athens. On his retirement in 1938, he was Northwestern's senior professor in length of service.
At the age of eighty, he died in his sleep at his summer home in Augusta, Michigan.
Achievements
John Adams Scott was the editor of the Classical Journal for twenty years. His most famous work The Unity of Homer was influential in turning the direction of Homeric studies in the United States from the German school of separatists to a new school of unitarians. He wrote a great amount of popular religious works: Socrates and Christ (1928), Luke, Greek Physician and Historian (1930), We Would Know Jesus (1936).
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
Religion
Scott was deeply involved with religious and intellectual questions. He tried to reconcile in some way pagan antiquity and Christianity, for both of which he had an unabashed and militant passion.
He was an active member of the First Presbyterian Church.
Views
John Adams devoted himself to the uncompromising defense of Homer as the author of the two great poems.
Membership
John Adams was a member of the American Philological Association (president, 1916) and of the Archaeological Institute of America.
Personality
Scott was by nature partisan. He had an energetic and vibrant personality.
Quotes from others about the person
Appraisals of Scott as a scholar vary greatly. In Maurice Platinauer's Fifty Years of Classical Scholarship (1954), there is the following statement: "A skilful if unscrupulous controversialist, he succeeded by a careful choice of examples in conveying the impression that the greatest scholars of Germany were not only pedants but fools. He certainly revealed the inaccuracy of some earlier statistics; but it may be questioned whether in matters of vocabulary and grammar a statistical approach is the right one. "
One must balance against this opinion Sterling Dow's evaluation: "Scott's The Unity of Homer did more than any other book to defeat, though it did not annihilate, those who believed the epics were a patch-work of different poems. In fact it has been the most influential book in the whole Sather series. "
Interests
John Adams enjoyed golfing.
Connections
On September 1, 1892, John Adams Scott married Matilda Jane Spring of Centralia, Illinois; they had a daughter, Dorothy Louise, and a son, Frederick Sterling.
