GILDERSLEEVE, BASIL LANNEAU (1831-1924), American classical scholar, born in Charleston (S.C.) on Oct. 23, 1831, graduated at Princeton in 1849, and studied at Berlin, Bonn and Gottingen. From 1856 to 1876 he was professor of Greek in the University of Virginia, holding the chair of Latin also in 1861 66, and in 1876 he became professor of Greek in the newly-found ed Johns Hopkins university, a position from which he retired in 1915. In 188o The American Journal of Philology was established under his editorial charge.
He published a Latin Grammar (1867 ; revised, with the co-oper ation of Gonzalez B. Lodge, 1894 and 1899) and a Latin series for use in secondary schools (1875), both marked by lucidity of order and mastery of grammatical theory and methods. His edition of Persius (1875) is of great value. But his bent was rather toward Greek than Latin. His special interest in Christian Greek was partly the cause of his editing in 1877 The Apologies of Justin Martyr, "which"—to use his own words—"I used unblushingly as a repository for my syntactical formulae." His Syntax of Classical Greek from Homer to Demosthenes with C. W. E. Miller (Part I., 'goo; Part II., 1911) collects these formulae. Gildersleeve edited in 1885 The Olympian and Pythian Odes of Pindar, with a brilliant and valuable introduction. His views on the function of grammar were summarized in a paper on The Spiritual Rights of Minute Research delivered at Bryn Mawr in 1895, and his col lected contributions to literary periodicals appeared in 1890 under the title Essays and Studies Educational and Literary. He was also the author of Hellas and Hesperia (1909) and of Creed of the Old South (1915 ). He died in Baltimore on Jan. 9, 1924.