Manatt, James Irving

James Irving Manatt (1845-1915), professor of Greek literature and history, was born in Millersburg, Ohio, on February 17, 1845. In 1864 he was a private in the 46th Iowa infantry. After his discharge he went to Chicago and worked for the Evening Post. He graduated from Iowa (now Grinnell) College in 1869 and received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1873. From 1874 to 1876 he was professor of Greek at Denison College. The next year he studied in Leipzig, and was then professor of Greek at Marietta College from 1877 to 1884. He was chancellor of the University of Nebraska from 1884 to 1889, and United States Consul at Athens from 1889 to 1893. In 1893 he became professor of Greek literature and history at Brown, a position he held until his sudden death from pneumonia on February 14, 1915 in Providence. On the occasion of his death, Professor Faunce wrote in his annual report, “James Irving Manatt was an old-fashioned scholar, of large horizon and boundless and contagious enthusiasm. He never lost the forest in the trees. He was a Grecian who never gave his life to the dative case, but to the Greek ideals, ancient and modern. His thorough study of the classic writers was supplemented by long residence in Greece, and no one who has seen him, as I have, by the banks of the Ilissus, in the shadow of the Acropolis, or on the shore of the Bay of Salamis, can ever forget how he had become saturated with Greek literature and life.”