Charles F. Edson

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University of Wisconsin-Madison Faculty Document 794
1 May 1989

MEMORIAL RESOLUTION OF THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON

ON THE DEATH OF EMERITUS PROFESSOR CHARLES FARWELL EDSON

Charles F. Edson, Professor Emeritus of Ancient History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, died on Wednesday, December 14, 1988, in Hebron Hall, Oakwood Lutheran Home, Madison, Wisconsin. Professor Edson was born in Los Angeles, California, December 26, 1905. He attended public schools in Los Angeles and San Francisco, then received his B.A. degree at Stanford University in 1929. He received his M.S in 1931 and his Ph.D. in 1939 at Harvard University. In 1938 he was appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin, and except for three years in the U.S. Army during World War II, and two appointments as a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, he continued to teach at the UW-Madison until his retirement in 1976.

Charles Edson's major research project was Inscriptiones Graecae, Editio minor, Volumen X: Inscriptiones Epiri, Macedoniae, Thraciae, Scythiae, Pars II: Inscriptiones Macedoniae, Fasciculus I: Inscriptiones Thessalonicae et Viciniae (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1972). He was the first American scholar to serve as an editor of this German Academy of Sciences' publication. This edition contains 1,041 inscriptions, mostly Greek with a few in Latin, dating from 300 B.C. to A.D. 700. For this effort he was elected to the German Archaeological Institute in 1972. In 1974 he won the Charles Goodwin Prize, awarded by the American Philological Association.

From the late 1930s until his retirement Charles Edson was a mainstay of instruction in Ancient History in the U.S. He was a rigorous trainer of graduate students, and a prodigious undergraduate lecturer. His two-semester survey of Ancient History was one of the most consistently taught and best attended in this country.
 
Charles Edson insisted that Herodotus and Edward Gibbon were the only historians whose writings could provoke laughter. He therefore kept his dry, sharp wit under wraps in his published works, but in the lecture hall and private conversation he had no such compunction. Long ago, for instance, he parodied Cicero's infamous hexameter (Cedant arma togae, concedat laurea laudi) on learning that undergraduate men who played in the UW-Madison band were excused from compulsory ROTC: "Cedant arma tubae ['Trumpets a-play, soldiers away']" he announced to a colleague. Colleagues, students and friends will forever remember the tuneless hum which punctuated all such witticisms. .
 
MEMORIAL COMMITTEE
Frank M. Clover, Chair
Herbert M. Howe
Kenneth S. Sacks
John Scarborough
Domenico Sella

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