Jesse Benedict Carter

Carter, Jesse Benedict (16 June 1872-20 July 1917), educator and classical scholar, was born in New York City, the son of Peter Carter, a publisher, and Mary Louise Benedict. He entered New York University in 1889 but after a year transferred to Princeton, where his studies gravitated toward literature and the arts but especially classical studies. He graduated at the top of his class in 1893. He then went to Germany, where the best training for a career as a classicist was to be found, and studied for a year at Leipzig (1893-1894) and a year at Berlin and Göttingen (1894-1895). He then returned to Princeton, where he was an instructor in Latin for two years (1895-1897), and then returned to Germany for a year to take his Ph.D. at Halle in 1898. At Halle he was a pupil of the great German student of Roman religion, Georg Wissowa, whose influence permeated his work for the rest of his life. His dissertation De Deorum Cognominibus (1898) was written on the surnames given to Roman divinities. He also studied archaeology under Carl Robert.

Carter returned to Princeton as assistant professor of Latin (1898-1902) and then as professor of Latin (1902-1907). In 1900 he was lecturer on Roman religion at the summer school of the University of Wisconsin, and the same year he published an annotated edition of Selections from the Roman Elegiac Poets, which he described as the fruit of several years of undergraduate teaching. In 1902 he married Kate Benedict Freeman of New York City; they had no children. The following year he published a school text, Virgil's Aeneid (1903). While still professor of Latin at Princeton, he went to Rome in 1904 as annual professor of Latin at the American School of Classical Studies, remaining in that position until 1907, when he left his professorship at Princeton to become director of the American School (1907-1912). While annual professor he produced The Religion of Numa (1906), a study of early Roman religious institutions and perhaps his most important book, and an English translation of Christian Huelsen's The Roman Forum (1906). When the American School of Classical Studies merged with the American Academy in Rome in 1911, Carter continued as director of the Classical School until 1912, and on 1 January 1913 he became director of the American Academy. The same year he was awarded an L.H.D. by Princeton. At that time the academy was housed in Villa Mirafiori on Via Nomentana, but following the merger work was begun on the construction of the new academy building at Porta San Pancrazio on the Janiculan hill. The Carters moved into Villa Bellacci there, although he was accustomed to giving his address as Villa Aurelia, which had been Giuseppe Garibaldi's headquarters in the defense of Rome in 1849.

Of medium height, stout, and round faced, Carter took great pride in his dress and had a flamboyant manner that made him a popular lecturer. A woman Fellow of the academy at the time later remarked, "The ladies swooned over him; he was a spell-binder." He was also known to be fond of the good life and convivial. His books were essentially published lectures. But he was a serious and highly respected scholar, and although inclined to extravagances that sometimes irritated the academy's trustees, he was an energetic and highly effective administrator and ably served the American Academy in Rome in a period of change and upheaval. Under his directorship the academy became an important intellectual and artistic center. In 1911 he produced his most popular book, The Religious Life of Ancient Rome, based on lectures given at the Lowell Institute in Boston in January of that year; this was a survey of Roman religion from its beginnings to the death of Gregory the Great in A.D. 595. In 1916, at the invitation of the French minister of public instruction, he gave a series of lectures at the Sorbonne and other universities in France on the growth of humanism in the United States.

In 1916, like some of the Fellows of the American Academy in Rome, Carter became actively involved in war relief work in northern Italy, and in recognition of this he was named Commendatore della Corona d'Italia by Victor Emmanuel III in 1917 at a ceremony at Villa Mirafiori. Shortly thereafter he departed for the north on a commission of the American Red Cross connected with the organization of its activities on the Italian front, but on the journey he died suddenly in Cervignano near Aquileia of heart trouble brought on reportedly by sunstroke. His last work, "The Reorganization of the Roman Priesthoods at the Beginning of the Republic," appeared in the first volume of the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome (1917).

In addition to his other work Carter was a contributor to volumes 4 and 5 of W. H. Roscher's Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie (1909-1915 and 1916-1924) and wrote the supplement volume Epitheta Deorum quae apud Poetas Romanos Leguntur (1902). He was also a contributor to James Hastings's Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (1908-1926). He was a member of the American Philological Association, the American Archaeological Society, the Imperial German Archaeological Institute, the British and American Archaeological Society of Rome, and Psi Upsilon. His excellent library was donated by his widow to the library of the American Academy together with a bronze bust of Carter.

Bibliography

There is little written about Carter except what he himself includes in the prefaces to his books. Somewhat fuller accounts of his years at the American Academy in Rome appear in the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 1916-17, pp. 31-33, 41-42, and Lucia and Alan Valentine, The American Academy in Rome, 1894-1969 (1973), pp. 62-75. There are obituaries in the New York Times, 23 July 1917, and the American Journal of Archaeology 21 (1917): 337, 340.

L. Richardson, Jr.

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