Charles Forster Smith


Charles Forster Smith was an American classical philologist, who particularly emerged as a Thucydides researcher.

Life

Charles Forster Smith, the son of Pastor James F. Smith and his wife Julia Forster Smith, studied at Wofford College, Harvard University and then from 1874 to 1875 at the universities in Leipzig and Berlin. He then taught as a professor of Classical and German Philology at Wofford College and again deepened his studies in Leipzig, where in 1881 he wrote a doctoral thesis in English on Dr. Phil. was awarded a doctorate.
After completing his doctorate, Smith worked at various universities in the United States: from 1881 as Professor of Latin and Greek at Williams College, from 1882 as Professor of Modern Foreign Languages at Vanderbilt University and from 1884 as Professor of Greek at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was a longstanding board member of the American Philological Association and 1905/06 co-editor of The Classical Journal. He retired in 1917, but remained scientifically and journalistically active. In 1919, his colleagues published a commemorative publication in his honor at the University of Wisconsin.
In his research, Smith dealt with both ancient languages and modern language phenomena. Throughout his life, he endeavored to improve higher education in the United States, which had only enabled higher degrees in a few places during his own time as a student. Smith's research focus was the Greek historian Thucydides. For him, Smith published scientific essays, selection editions and finally a bilingual edition in the Loeb Classical Library, which remained in use for a long time.
Fonts
A Study of Plutarch's Life of Artaxerxes, with Especial Reference to the Sources. Leipzig 1881
Thucydides Book VII. Boston 1886
Thucydides Book III. Boston 1894
with Campbell Bonner : Xenophon's Anabasis. The First Four Books. New York 1905
Greek literature. New York 1912
Charles Kendall Adams: a life sketch. Madison 1924

Translations

Gustav Hertzberg : Ancient Greece. Philadelphia / New York 1902
Thucydides. 4 volumes, London / New York 1919-1923

Literature

Classical Studies in Honor of Charles Forster Smith. Madison 1919
Ward W. Briggs : Smith, Charles Forster. In: Ward W. Briggs : Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists. Westport, CT / London: Greenwood Press 1994,, pp. 593f.