Thomas Day Seymour

Thomas Day Seymour (April 1, 1848 – December 31, 1907) was an American classical scholar, Professor of Greek at Yale University, and leading expert on the works of Homer. He was elected in 1900 a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1906 a member of the American Philosophical Society.

Quotes

His earliest ode which has come down to us is the tenth Pythian ode in honor of the victory in the long footrace of Hippocles, one of the powerful Thessalian Aleuadae. This ode was composed when the poet was only twenty years old, and shows that he already had some prominence, else that family would not have invited him to celebrate the victory. His earliest Olympian ode which has been preserved is the eleventh, of 484 b.c.
- "Introduction by Thomas D. Seymour". Selected odes of Pindar. Ginn, Heath, & Company. 1882. pp. v–xlviii. (quote from p. vii)

Homer, like Milton, could not think of an army in motion without thinking of its resemblance to something else. Just before the Catalogue of the Ships, the movements of the Achaean armies are described by six detailed comparisons, B 455-483 : the brightness of their armor is compared with the gleam of fire upon the mountains ; their noisy tumult, with the clamor of cranes or swans on the Asian plain ; in multitude, they are as the innumerable leaves and flowers of spring-time; they are impetuous and bold as the eager flies around the farm buildings; they are marshalled by their leaders as flocks of goats by their herds; their leader (Agamemnon) is like to Zeus, to Ares, to Poseidon,—he is preeminent among the heroes as a bull in a herd of cattle.
- Seymour, Thomas D. (1886). Introduction to the Language and Verse of Homer. College Series of Greek Authors, edited under the supervision of John Williams White and Thomas D. Seymour. Boston: Ginn & Company. p. 17. (1st edition 1885; 104 pages)

A teacher seldom receives full recognition for his services during his lifetime, unless he lives to extreme old age. While the physician is often cheered by the gratitude of those to whom his skill has restored to health, and the clergyman receives the affectionate thanks of those whom he has guided and comforted, and the successful lawyer is supposed to be burdened with plaudits and fees,—the teacher has to do mainly with those who are too immature to understand the services which he renders and to appreciate the self-denial which is manifested in much of his care. His pupils are too little acquainted with the world to compare his acumen and his learning with those of others; they cannot sympathize with him in his ambitions and difficulties and task; they may not feel his strong desire to go on to the acquisition of new knowledge.
- Carroll Cutler: Address in Memory of Rev. Carroll Cutler, D. D., Fourth President of Adelbert College of Western Reserve University. Press of Winn & Judson. 1894. p. 7. (36 pages — See Carroll Cutler & Western Reserve University.)

The first American scholar to study in Greece was Henry M. Baird, now the distinguished Hellenist and historian, of the University of the City of New York, and an honored member of the Managing Committee of our School, who passed a year in Greece just half a century ago, in 1851-52,—attending lectures in the University, and travelling through the country. Four or five years later, in 1856, he published his work on "Modern Greece," which remains the fullest account of that country ever written by an American, and contains, as we might expect from Dr. Baird, much information with regard to the monuments of antiquity.
- (1902) . "The First Twenty Years of the School At Athens". Bulletin of the School of Classical Studies at Athens 5: 9. (based on a presentation to the Archaeological Institute of America at its meeting at Columbia University, on the evening of December 27, 1901; text at archive.org)

Only a bold man half a century ago dared to hold that a substantial basis of fact underlay the stories of the battles before Troy,—not to speak of the wanderings of Odysseus; and archaeologists believed that the poet had not simply idealized but also exaggerated freely the wonders of the works of art and craft to which he refers. When, little more than a third of a century ago, Dr. Schliemann began to dig for indications of early settlements on the chief Homeric sites,—first at Hissarlik on the shore of the Hellespont, which had been held by the ancients to be the site on which Homeric Troy had stood, and then in Argolis, at Mycenae and Tiryns,—many mocked just as they would have done if the enthusiastic German had sought to determine the sites of the exploits of Jack the Giant-killer.
- Life in the Homeric Age. Macmillan. 1908. pp. 3–4.