page_title: John Henry Wright
section_title: Scholarly works
hierarchical_section_title: John Henry Wright / Career / Scholarly works
caption_attribution_description: English: A History of All Nations from the Earliest Times Volum 1 title page 1905 edition
context_page_description: John Henry Wright was an American classical scholar born at Urumiah, Persia. He earned his Bachelors and Masters at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. After junior appointments in 1886 he joined Johns Hopkins as a professor of classical philology. In 1887, he became a professor of Greek at Harvard, where, from 1895 to 1908, he was also Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
  Some of Wright's most notable works are A History of All Nations from the Earliest Times, a 24–volume history of the world; the translations Masterpieces of Greek literature; and The Origin of Plato's Cave. He was active in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philological Association, and similar organizations. From 1889 to 1906 he co-edited the Classical Review and from 1897 to 1906 he was chief editor of the American Journal of Archaeology.
  In 1893 Wright met the Indian Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda, who greatly influenced him; Wright described Vivekananda as "more learned than all our learned professors put together."
  Wright received LL.D.s from Dartmouth and Case Western Reserve University in 1901. He died on 25 November 1908 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
context_section_description: Wright wrote, edited and translated many books, monographs and scholarly papers. Some of his earlier notable works are— An Address on the Place of Original Research in Collegiate Education (1882), The College in the University and Classical Philology in the College (1886), translation of Collignon's Manual of Greek Archæology (1886), etc. An Address on the Place of Original Research in Collegiate Education was a lecture which he delivered on 7 October 1886, at the opening of the eleventh academic year of Johns Hopkins College. In the same year, he translated A manual of Greek archaeology written by Maxime Collignon to English. In 1892, Wright wrote The Date of Cylon. Though Wright wrote it in 1892, it remained unpublished until Aristotle's work on the Constitution of the Athenians was discovered; this resulted in confirming his recording of the "Chronology of Events in Athens" of the seventh century. In 1893, he wrote a paper named Herondaea, which contained valuable research works on the recently discovered papyrus of Herondas. In 1894, his "Studies in Sophocles" was published.
  In 1902, Wright edited and published Masterpieces of Greek literature. In this book, he translated and published selections of most notable Greek literature including works of Homer, Tyrtaeus, Archilochus, Callistratus, Alcaeus, Sappho, Anacreon, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato, Theocritus and Lucian. The book also included short biographical sketches on these philosophers and writers and explanatory notes and analysis. In 1904, he read a paper "Present Problems of the History of the Classical Literature'" at the Congress of Arts and Sciences at the St. Louis Exposition.
  In 1905, he served as editor, translator and supervisor on A History of All Nations from the Earliest Times in twenty-four volumes. The other notable scholars who were involved in this project were Ferdinand Justi, Sara Yorke Stevenson, and Morris Jastrow. The History of All Nations consisted of 24 volumes– five were on Antiquity, five on history of the Middle Ages, ten on history of the modern world, two on history of America, and remaining two volumes were comprehensive index volumes of the series. The scholars wrote, they wanted to write a "history of mankind", which required collaboration of many editors and scholars.
  In 1906, Wright published "The Origin of Plato's Cave," an outgrowth of his interest in the archaeological excavations of the Cave of Vari on Mt. Hymettus near Athens. In this article he deals with the antecedents of the allegory of the cave that the philosopher introduced in the opening of the seventh book of the Republic. Wright demonstrated that the attributes of the allegorical cave closely matched the actual one; he concluded they were likely based on it, with the possible influence of additional elements from the Empedocles' poem Purifications and the Quarry-Grottos of Syracuse.
caption: Title page of A History of All Nations from the Earliest Times Volume 1 (1905 edition)
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