William Gardner Hale

William Gardner Hale (Feb. 9, 1849 - June 23, 1928), American classical scholar, was born in Savannah, Georgia to a resident New England family.

Hale was a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy. He graduated at Harvard University in 1870, and took a post-graduate course in philosophy there in 1874-1876; studied classical philology at Leipzig and Göttingen in 1876-1877; was tutor in Latin at Harvard from 1877 to 1880, and succeeding Tracy Peck as professor of Latin in Cornell University from 1880 to 1892, when he became professor of Latin and head of the Latin department of the University of Chicago. From 1894 to 1899 he was chairman and in 1895-1896 first director of the American School of Classical Studies at Rome. Hale held honorary degrees from Princeton, St. Andrew's and Aberdeen Universities.

He is best known as an original teacher on questions of syntax. In The cum-constructions: their history and functions, which appeared in Cornell University studies in classical philology (1888–1889; and in German version by Neizert in 1891), he attacked Hoffmann's distinction between absolute and relative temporal clauses as published in Lateinische Zeitpartikeln (1874); Hoffmann replied in 1891, and the best summary of the controversy is in Wetzel's Der Streit zwischen Hoffmann und Hale (1892). Hale wrote also The sequence of tenses in Latin (1887–1888), The anticipatory subjunctive in Greek and Latin (1894), and a Latin grammar (1903), to which the parts on sounds, inflection and word-formation were contributed by Carl Darling Buck.

After founding the American School of Classical Studies, Rome, 1905–06, Professor Hale served as its director and later, chairman of the board. Returning to Chicago, Hale was Editor, The Classical Quarterly in 1914. He continued his teaching and retired from the university in 1920, spending the next eight years conducting research on a manuscript of Catullus he discovered in Rome in 1896.