GONZALEZ LODGE (portrayed by Wayne Millan) “Representing Our Ancestors”

Gonzalez Lodge (1863-1942): Professor of Latin, Bryn Mawr College, 1889-1900, Professor of Latin and Greek, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1900-1930. 1883 BA, 1886 PhD Johns Hopkins University.

Lodge was born in Fort Littleton, near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, the son of a physician. He received his BA degree from the Johns Hopkins University in 1883, and remained there to earn his PhD in 1886, at the age of 22, writing a dissertation on “The Participle in Euripides” under Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve. After teaching Greek at Davidson College in North Carolina from 1886 through 1888, he joined the faculty at the all-female Bryn Mawr College in 1888 as Professor of Latin. Edith Hamilton was among his students, Paul Shorey and Herbert Weir Smyth among his classics colleagues on the faculty.

While Lodge was at Bryn Mawr he collaborated with his former teacher on the Gildersleeve-Lodge Latin Grammar (1894) and in the same year launched the Gildersleeve-Lodge Latin Series with the D.C. Heath publishing company in Boston, New York, and Chicago. The inaugural issue of Classical World, which Lodge founded as The Classical Weekly in 1907, and for which he served as editor-in-chief through 1913, features an advertisement for ten of the sixteen volumes in the series (in the same column as an ad for “Knox World Renowned Hats” of Fifth Avenue and Broadway). Contributors to the Latin Series included public and private secondary school teachers as well as college faculty.

In 1900 Lodge accepted a position as Professor of Latin and Greek at Columbia Teachers College. Two years later another classicist, Julius Sachs, a former president of the American Philological Association then serving as principal of the Sachs Collegiate Institute Schools of Boys and Girls, joined him on the faculty as Professor of Secondary Education. Perhaps their most eminent student was the classicist and educational reformer Alexander Inglis, an influential champion of comprehensive high schools, whose First Book In Latin is also advertised in the first issue of CW. As a spokesperson for classics and an educator of educators, Lodge advocated for adapting classics to contemporary life: through the oral and active use of Latin in the classroom, a focus on the inspirational values of classical literature, and close attention to the vital political and ethical issues addressed by ancient Greco-Roman authors.

Lodge retired from Columbia in 1930. Between 1901 and 1933, he published his monumental two-volume Lexicon Plautinum. In 1909, at the age of 45, he married Ida B. Stanwood. Franklin and Marshall College awarded him an honorary LL.D in 1901, and Columbia an honorary Litt.D in 1929. He died on December 23, 1942 in New Canaan, Connecticut.

During his thirty years at Columbia Teachers College, Lodge wrote extensively about classics pedagogy and the role of classics in society at large. The CW inaugural issue contains his “The Vocabulary of High School Latin”; over the next few years, in his capacity as CW editor-in-chief, he shared his thoughts on such topics as President Garfield's inaugural address, American Classicism, Latin teaching in a German gymnasium, Latin as a universal language, Gilbert Murray's Greek, and the English Classical Association. His prominence as an educational authority allowed him access to a wider public audience too: “Imagination in the Study of the Classics” appeared in the 1901 Educational Review; “The Revival of Latin” and “The Sham Argument Against Latin” appeared in the Nation during World War I.