William Watson Goodwin

Background

William Watson Goodwin the son of Hervey Bradford Goodwin and Lucretia Ann Watson. He was born on May 9, 1831, at Concord, Massachusets, where his father was associated with Dr. Ezra Ripley in the ministry of the Congregational(Unitarian) Church.

He was descended from Christopher Goodwin, who was in Charlestown in 1642, and from Myles Standish of Plymouth. Both his parents died during his infancy, and he was reared in Plymouth by his grandmother, Lucretia Burr (Sturges) Watson.

The adjacent Clark’s Island, granted to his ancestors by royal charter, remained his summer home throughout his life, and he was an expert yachtsman.

Education

Goodwin was taught his first Greek by his uncle, Benjamin Marston Watson, and entered Harvard in 1847. There, as he often liked to recall, he pursued the rather meager curriculum of a small provincial college, occasionally relieved, however, by the lectures of Louis Agassiz, Asa Gray, Henry W. Longfellow, and others.

He spent two additional years as a graduate student in Cambridge, but in 1853, he went to Gottingen, where the great classical philologists of the day were Schneidewin and K. Hermann. After studying also in Bonn and in Berlin, he received the degree of Pli. D. from Gottingen in 1855.

His dissertation, De Potcntiae Veterum Gentium Maritimae Epochis apud Eusebium (1835), dealt with sea power in antiquity, an important subject in itself, and noteworthy as treated by one who was to win fame as a grammarian and an interpreter of literature rather than as a historian.

Career

After visiting Italy and Greece, Goodwin returned to Cambridge in 1836 and began his long career as teacher and officer of Harvard College.

The first tutor in Greek and Latin, then in Greek alone, he succeeded C. C. Felton in 1860 as Eliot Professor of Greek Literature, a chair founded by the father of President Eliot, and held by Goodwin until he resigned in 1901.

Even then, as professor emeritus, he continued his lectures on Plato and Aristotle, and from 1903 to 1909 was a member of the Board of Overseers of the University.

Becoming one of the incorporators of the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women and later of its successor, Radcliffe College, he served on various of its governing boards until his death.

Achievements

• Goodwin was prominently engaged in forwarding the processes which transformed Harvard from a college to a university, his one guiding principle being that scholarship should be raised and maintained at a high level. He became one of the founders of the Archaeological Institute of America (1879), and was the first director of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (1882 - 83). The result was a paper of the first importance on “The Battle of Salamis, ” first published in the Papers of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, and later in the Harvard Studies in Classical Philology. In recognition of the quality of his scholarship, he received many honorary degrees from American and foreign universities and was elected to membership in many learned societies. Goodwin was among the first to admit women of advanced training to his courses.

Works

More photos

• book

  • A Greek grammar,

    (Antique hard cover 451 page textbook on Greek Grammar fro...)

  • Greek Reader (Prose) Consisting of Selections from Xenophon, Plato, Herodotus, and Thucydides: With Notes Adapted to Goodwin's Greek Grammar And ... to Crosby's and Hadley's Grammars ...

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

  • Plutarch's Morals

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

  • Plutarch's Morals, tr. by several hands. Corrected and revised by W.W. Goodwin

    (This is a reproduction of a classic text optimised for ki...)

  • Memoir of George Martin Lane

    (This is a reproduction of a classic text optimised for ki...)

  • The Agamemnon of Aeschylus : a revised text and a translation

    (The Agamemnon of Aeschylus : a revised text and a transla...)

  • The First Four Books of Xenophon's Anabasis: With Notes, Adapted to the Latest Edition of Goodwin's Greek Grammar, and to Hadley's Greek Grammar (Revised by Allen) - Primary Source Edition

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

  • Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb (Classic Reprint)

    (§ 1. The Greek verb has five Moods, the Indicative, Subj...)

Views

Goodwin opposed all measures, like the reduction of the college course from four years to three, which he thought implied a lowering of standards; on the other hand, he often renounced his own naturally conservative instincts when convinced that the cause of learning would thereby be benefited.

In 1866-67, when the faculty numbered only twenty-one persons, Goodwin joined the liberal majority which reduced the required studies in the sophomore year to seven hours a week, with elective studies amounting to six hours a week.

While he voted to give up compulsory Greek for sophomores, in order that the elective system might have free play for older students, he opposed with resourcefulness, frank speech, and forceful leadership the substitution of other subjects for Greek in the requirements for matriculation.

When, at the early age of twenty-nine, Goodwin found himself a full-fledged professor, he showed his zeal for higher standards by the publication of his Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb (1860), the book which parted company at once with the somewhat limp and flabby methods of Greek study in America and with the metaphysical concepts in which Greek syntax had become involved in Germany.

Upon this work he concentrated his exact and thorough reading of the Greek authors, his deep insight into meanings theretofore misapprehended his fine knowledge of English idiom, his power of scientific classification, and a certain sturdy common sense which was part of his New England inheritance.

This work was greatly enlarged in 1890, but it had been done so well in the beginning that he was not obliged to retract anything of importance. He also published An Elementary Greek Grammar.

In 1861, he had revised and republished C. C. Felton’s translations of the Birds and Clouds of Aristophanes, and two years later the same author’s Panegyricus of Isocrates. In 1870, he published in five volumes a revised translation- of Plutarch’s Morals.

At a time when good text-books were rare, he brought out a Greek Reader (1871), excellent for its selections and for the judicious notes thereon, and Selections from Xenophon and Herodotus (1877). In collaboration with J. W. White, his younger colleague, he prepared The First Four Books of Xenophon’s Anabasis (1880), which has since appeared in many editions.

The constitutional, legal and artistic achievements of the Greeks also interested Goodwin profoundly. Greek law and legal procedure were the subjects of one of his frequently-repeated courses, and his intimate knowledge of them, as well as of the tangled history of fourth century politics, gave peculiar authority to his editions of Demosthenes on the Crown (1901 and 1904) and Against Midias (1906).

His critical method is admirably illustrated in his paper “On the Text and Interpretation of certain passages in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus”.

Other papers in the English Journal of Philology and articles in Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon (1883) exhibit his exactitude and lucidity in exposition.

Unlike many Greek scholars of his own and earlier generations, Goodwin early saw the advantage, if not the necessity, of visiting Greece.

Personality

Though Goodwin was not a controversialist by nature, his convictions were decided, and with wit, sarcasm, and a clear marshaling of facts and precedents he fought the battle for Greek, which waged until 1896.

In debates into which his opponents often injected acrimony, he was never known to lose his temper, although he could often see that the fight was a losing one.

As he told his chief opponent, President Eliot, he “had been set to guard a gate, ” and he guarded it well.

His home life was one of rare sweetness and dignity.

The virtues of his ancestors were reflected in his own frank and simple bearing, his clear, though somewhat hurried, speech, his forthright and upright life.

Upon the solid qualities of his Pilgrim ancestry, which had given him a reticence and a poise not unlike the reticence of his own Greeks, he superimposed a culture that was cosmopolitan, a purity of word and action that made him, as President Eliot said, “a model of the vigorous, high-minded, happy scholar. ”

Interests

• Writers

  Goodwin's favorite dramatist was Aeschylus, and no one who listened to his translation of the Agamemnon could doubt Goodwin’s appreciation of the beauty and ethical import of that drama.

Connections

Goodwin was twice married happily. By his first wife, Emily Jenks of Philadelphia, he had two sons, one of whom died in infancy. The other, Charles Haven, died a year after his graduation in 1888.

In his memory, Goodwin founded one of the best-endowed scholarships in his university. His second wife, Ellen Chandler, whom he married in 1882, died in 1914.

Father:

Hersey Bradford Goodwin

Mother:

Lucretia Ann Watson Goodwin

15 February 1808 - 11 November 1831

Wife:

Emily Haven Goodwin

10 July 1844 - 8 July 1874

Wife:

Ellen Chandler Goodwin

16 December 1846 - 5 March 1914

Son:

Horace Howard Goodwin

8 December 1864 - 1 November 1885

colleague:

J. W. White