Robert John Bonner was a classicist and Professor and Chair of the Classics Department at the University of Chicago for many years. The following biography was written by Gertrude Smith, a former graduate student of R.J.’s, and personal friend and frequent dinner guest of R.J. and Annie Willson’s. Gertrude also became an eminent classicist as the Edwin Olson Professor of Greek at the University of Chicago, and member of the editorial board of Classical Philology. She wrote this biography shortly after R.J.’s death in 1946. It is reproduced below in its entirety.
Robert John Bonner (1868-1946)
ROBERT J.BONNER was born in Oxford County, Ontario, on October 24, 1868. Like many of his contemporaries who intended to make law their profession, he elected the honors course in Classics at the University of Toronto, where he was graduated with first-class honors in 1890. Three years later he was graduated from Osgoode Hall (the Ontario Law School) and became a member of the Ontario Bar. But his predilection for the ancient classics and a life of teaching was soon apparent and he accepted the post of classical master in Collingwood, Ontario, where he remained until coming to the University of Chicago in 1899 to commence the work for his doctorate in Greek under Paul Shorey. This work was interrupted by a three-year period, 1900-1903, as professor of Latin at John B. Stetson University in DeLand, Florida. He also taught in the Stetson law school. During this period, he wrote his Greek Composition, which was published in 1903.
From Florida he returned to the University of Chicago and was awarded the doctorate in 1904, whereupon he became a member of the faculty of the Department of Greek, where he continued until his retirement, receiving full professorial rank in 1913, and being appointed Chairman of the Department upon Mr. Shorey’s retirement from the administrative work of the Department in 1927. Mr. Bonner’s nominal retirement came in 1934 at the age of sixty-five, but for three years thereafter he continued to teach a seminar and to pursue his writing. He made his home in Chicago until 1942 and worked daily in his old office at the University. In the fall of 1942, he suffered a stroke while on a visit to his daughter in Maryland, but from this he recovered sufficiently to resume his work and he thereafter returned to Chicago for four academic quarters to go on with the research which he loved so well. Another stroke occurred on January 23, 1946, and he died that same day in Aberdeen, Maryland.
Mr. Bonner was for many years a member of the American Philological Association and the Archaeological Institute of America, but his favorite classical organization was the Classical Association of the Middle West and South, with which he was connected from its inception and of which he rarely missed a meeting. He was always enthusiastic about this group, and he loved the friendliness exhibited at its meetings, to which his presence contributed immeasurably. He served as the president of the Association in 1928-1929. Another group very dear to his heart was the Chicago Classical Club, of which he held the presidency for a two-year term. He was instrumental in founding Eta Sigma Phi, the undergraduate classical fraternity, whose mother chapter was at the University of Chicago.
It was long a tradition at the University of Chicago that even in the freshman year students should have an opportunity to come in contact with some of the finest minds in the University. Hence elementary courses were frequently taught by outstanding personalities. Mr. Bonner developed an elementary Greek course which became famous. The plan was to give the essential forms and syntax of Greek in one quarter and then to introduce the students immediately to some of the finest specimens of Greek literature. For this purpose, Mr. Bonner worked out with Mr. Theodore C. Burgess an elementary Greek book which was published in 1907. Mr. Bonner greatly enjoyed contacts with young students, and he continued to teach the elementary course until nearly the end of his teaching career. He believed that there was no royal road to the mastery of a language, but that thorough drill was necessary. He made his students work. But he had the power of presenting his material so interestingly that students found the elementary course exciting, and the results of his teaching were extraordinary. Many of these students elected Greek as their major subject and a goodly number continued to advanced degrees in Classics.
Interest in Law
ALTHOUGH Mr. Bonner had chosen a life of teaching, his interest in law never ceased. This was first apparent in the subject chosen for his doctoral dissertation, Evidence in Athenian Courts, a study which had suggested itself in Mr. Shorey’s seminar in the Attic Orators. It has remained an authoritative work on the subject. The dissertation was followed by a steady stream of articles in the pages of Classical Philology on legal, political, and historical questions. Shortly Mr. Bonner was directing dissertations in the field of ancient Greek legal institutions. Several students had followed him to Chicago from Stetson University, especially to work under his direction, and one of these, George M. Calhoun, was the first to write his dissertation under his guidance, a monograph entitled Athenian Clubs in Politics and Litigation. This dissertation met with universal approval. It was followed by John Oscar Lofberg’s Sycophancy in Ancient Athens, and by various other significant studies in the field. The group working under Mr. Bonner soon became recognized both at home and abroad as the Bonner School of Greek Law.
Mr. Bonner came to feel that some of the interesting material with which he was dealing should be put in less technical form for the interested but uninitiated layman, and in I927 to meet this need he published his Lawyers and Litigants in Ancient Athens, which was widely acclaimed by both classicists and jurists. In I937. he was invited to deliver the Sather classical lectures at the University of California, and the tangible resuIt of this sojourn in California was his Aspects of Athenian Democracy, dedicated to Maurice Hutton, who, as his teacher at the University of Toronto, had furnished much of the inspiration for his early love of the classics. At Mr. Bonner’s suggestion he and I determined to put in definitive form a study of Athenian court machinery and practice and procedure. The first volume of this work appeared in I930 under the title The Administration of Justice from Homer to Aristotle, under the aegis of the University of Chicago Press. The work proved to be an enormous task and the second volume did not appear until I938. Up to this point we had been preoccupied with the Athenian legal system, but as the second volume progressed it became apparent that the series would not be completed to our satisfaction until we had worked out the details of other Greek legal systems for comparison with, and clarification of, the Athenian system. It was on this third volume that we were working until Mr. Bonner’s departure from Chicago in I942 and on the subsequent occasions when he returned for a quarter at a time to Chicago. We were still working on it when he left Chicago on December I5 of last year [1945], although Mr. Bonner had finished the parts on which he intended to work with the exception of the preface, which he still expected to write in Maryland. Parts of the content of the volume in somewhat abbreviated form have already appeared in Classical Philology, and it is expected that the whole volume will be published in the not-too-distant future.
Mr. Bonner’s prominence as a scholar won him wide recognition. In addition to the above, mentioned Sather professorship in I932 he was awarded an honorary Litt. D. by the University of Toronto in 1927 and the same honorary degree at Trinity College, Dublin, in I937. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a corresponding member of the Academy of Athens.
As a Teacher
IT is impossible wholly to dissociate Mr. Bonner the scholar from Mr. Bonner the teacher, for his classroom method was so thoroughly permeated with the methods and aims of scholarship. He loved a problem, he enjoyed to the utmost seeing a student sense a problem and become excited in its
solution. He wanted to discover intellectual curiosity and to stimulate independent thought, and he always had boundless good humor and tireless energy for the serious student. Occasionally the material presented in a seminar report in Mr. Bonner’s judgment merited publication, and many students will remember Mr. Bonner’s real pleasure when he thought that the student had reached a sound solution of an important problem and the generous help and encouragement which he gave in reworking and organizing such material. His graduate classroom, like the undergraduate, was very informal. The student was led to see a problem and then was helped by suggestion to its correct solution. All of this was done as if the problem were a gay adventure, with much the same sort of attitude of exploration which he exhibited a t his beloved summer home on the Georgian Bay, when, out paddling a canoe, he came upon some hitherto unexamined island or inlet which called for investigation. In the classroom the students realized that they were in the presence. not only of a great scholar, but also of a colleague and a friend. It is not to be wondered at that he developed many of his students into distinguished scholars. And many students who were not working primarily with him owed the publication of their first articles to him. He often seemed far prouder of his students’ achievements than of his own. He was a keen judge of students, especially in sensing their potentialities for scholarship. And he was utterly contemptuous of those who appropriated their students’ work in their research. I do not think that Mr. Bonner ever published merely for the sake of publishing. It was because he had found something of compelling interest which added greatly to the history of ideas. He was a truly great scholar, modest, straightforward, keen-sighted, generous, sympathetic, uncompromising in his standards, and with a lawyer’s impartiality. In addition he had kindliness and an unfailing sense of humor. Classical scholarship is far richer because of the work which he has left, just as we who were his friends are richer because of our contacts with his warm and human personality.
GERTRUDE SMITH