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Milton Wylie Humphreys was born on September 15, 1844 in Greenbrier County, West Virginia. He was a great-grandson of Andrew Humphreys who emigrated from Ireland to Pennsylvania about 1775, and the son of Dr. Andrew Cavet Humphreys and Mary McQuain (Hefner) Humphreys.
Naturally an avid student, he supplemented by his own efforts the woefully inadequate resources of the schools accessible to him, and was finally prepared to enter Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) at Lexington, Va. , in September 1860. No sooner had he completed his freshman year than the college was disrupted by the Civil War.
While planning to go into business for a livelihood, he learned that Robert E. Lee had accepted the presidency of Washington College. "This changed the whole course of my life, " he wrote. Lee was his hero, in peace as well as in war. Accordingly, after a brief period of school teaching, he got back to Lee's side at Lexington in the spring of 1866; and there he remained, for poverty could not dislodge a student of such brilliant promise. In June 1869 he was graduated with the degree of M. A. , at the head of his class. For two sessions previous he had been assisting in Latin and Greek, and upon the classics as his special field of study his choice now became fixed; although he had long been distracted by the beckonings of other intellectual adventures, and although, when a boy preparing for college, his "aversion to the very thought of studying Greek, " he writes, "was intense. "
He received the degree of Ph. D. from Leipzig in 1874.
Young Humphreys had set his heart on joining the artillery, and after many difficulties and delays he was in March 1862 mustered in as a gunner in the battery of Capt. Thomas A. Bryan, of the 13th Virginia Light Artillery. "I became known, " he wrote later, "as 'the first gunner of Bryan's Battery, ' a title in which I take more pride than in any other ever bestowed upon me. " Until the end of the war he served his gun not only with bravery and affection, but with great scientific ingenuity; and long years after his active service his interest in the theory of gunnery made him a frequent and valued contributor to the United States Journal of Artillery. When the guns were silenced in 1865, Humphreys returned to an impoverished home.
He accepted an assistant professorship in Washington College, and subsequently served as adjunct professor of ancient languages until June 1875. For two sessions of this tenure he was on leave of absence in Germany for graduate study. In September 1875 the new Vanderbilt University made him its first professor of Greek, and he remained there eight years.
Still another Southern university he helped to launch was the University of Texas; he became in its opening year, 1883-84, professor of Latin and Greek, and remained there until 1887 when he became professor of Greek in the University of Virginia. This position he held for twenty-five years, resigning in 1912, but continuing to make his home in Charlottesville until his death. Physically and mentally Humphreys was cast in a large mould. Powerful, rugged, and awkward, his body never outgrew the young mountaineer, and there was something elemental also in the scope and profundity of his mind. The variety of his intellectual capacities, and the breadth and accuracy of his information were phenomenal.
During his long career as a teacher of the classics, he declined university professorships in English, in modern languages and in physics; gave courses in Hebrew, botany, and mathematics; and twice declined the presidency of a state university. In his special field his achievement must be rated high. His interests were predominantly linguistic rather than literary, but his contributions cover a wide range. His monographs are to be found mainly in the Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, of which organization he was president in 1882-83, and in the American Journal of Philology. A chapter of his doctoral dissertation, published under the title De accentus momento in versu heroico (Leipzig, 1874), was the first of a notable series of articles on ancient metric, most of which appeared in the Transactions and Proceedings. Apart from these, perhaps his most important monograph is "The Agon of the Old Comedy". His annotated texts, Aristophanes: Clouds (1885), The Antigone of Sophocles (1891), and Demosthenes on the Crown (1913), are of great value, and cannot be neglected by any student of these authors. For years he served as American reviewer for the Berliner Philologische Wochenschrift, and from 1878 to 1888 was editor general for North America of the "Revue des Revues, " appended to the Revue de Philologie.
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He married on May 3, 1877, Louise Frances Garland, daughter of Dr. Landon C. Garland, chancellor of the university.
