Robert Alexander Neil

Robert Alexander Neil
Born	(1852-12-26)December 26, 1852
Died	June 19, 1901(1901-06-19) (aged 48)
Occupation	Classical scholar
Academic background
Education	Aberdeen Grammar School University of Aberdeen Peterhouse, Cambridge
Academic work
Institutions	Pembroke College, Cambridge
Notable students	Jane Ellen Harrison Alan Wace

Robert Alexander Neil (26 December 1852– 19 June 1901), who generally published as R. A. Neil, was a Scottish classical scholar.

Life

Early life and education

Robert Alexander Neil was born on 26 December 1852. He was the second son of Robert Neil, a minister in the Church of Scotland and the parish priest of Glengairn near Ballater in Aberdeenshire, and of Neil's wife, Mary Read. In an obituary of Neil published in 1912, his long-time friend Peter Giles recorded that Neil had been interested in books from a young age.

Neil was initially educated at a local school, run by a Mr. Coutts, and taught classics by his father. He later attended Aberdeen Grammar School, from which he was awarded a scholarship to the University of Aberdeen in 1866, at the age of thirteen, where he was taught by the Hellenist William Duguid Geddes; Neil placed top of Geddes's class at the end of his first year, and graduated from Aberdeen with a First in 1870. He was jointly awarded the university's Simpson Greek prize alongside Alexander Shewan, who later became a Homeric scholar, in 1870, and was awarded a Fullerton Scholarship in 1871. During the winter of 1871–72, Neil worked as a library assistant at Aberdeen before taking up the study of anatomy and chemistry, intending to graduate as a medical doctor; however, he instead took a scholarship in 1872 to Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he read classics.

Neil's teachers at Cambridge included the ancient historians James Smith Reid and Richard Shilleto, and the literary scholar A. W. Verrall. Although Neil was initially disadvantaged by his limited experience of translation into Latin and Greek, which formed a major part of the Cambridge curriculum but had featured little at Aberdeen, he was awarded the Craven scholarship in 1875 and graduated as the second-highest classicist in his year ("Second Classic") in 1876.

Academic career

Neil became a close friend of James Adam, another Scottish classicist and Aberdeen alumnus who had taken a fellowship at Emmanuel College in December 1884. The two kept a strict appointment for Sunday lunch together, which lasted from their meeting until Neil's death, sixteen years later. Neil was best man at Adam's wedding to the classicist Adela Marion Kensington in 1890, and in 1891 Adam named his first son, Neil Kensington Adam, after him.

The classicist Jane Ellen Harrison, one of the first women to make an academic career in England, took a post as a resident lecturer at Cambridge's Newnham College in 1898. Neil was at that time giving lectures in Cambridge's women's colleges; Harrison studied Sanskrit and the history of Indian religions under him, and began to collaborate on her academic work with him. Harrison was engaged to marry Neil at the time of his death.

Neil was the tutor of the future archaeologist Alan Wace during the latter's studies at Pembroke. He suggested to Wace that he should study classical archaeology for part two, the final year of his degree: Wace subsequently achieved a First with distinction in the examinations of 1901.

Neil died on the morning of 19 June 1901, following a short bout of appendicitis. His sisters, Mary E. Neil and Catherine G. Neil, endowed in 1953 the R. A. Neil prizes at the University of Aberdeen – two prizes of £35 (equivalent to £1,234 in 2023) awarded for examination results in Classics.

Neil served for several years on the council of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies. On Neil's death, the society's president, Richard Jebb, described him as "a classical scholar of rare learning and acumen".

Works cited

• Aberdeen University Calendar 1961–1962, Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen, 1961
• Bierl, Anton (2012). "Orality, Fluid Textualization and Interweaving Themes: Some Remarks on the Doloneia: Magical Horses from Night to Light and Death to Life". In Montanari, Franco; Rengakos, Antonios; Tsagalis, Christos (eds.). Homeric Contexts: Neoanalysis and the Interpretation of Oral Poetry. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter. pp. 133–174. ISBN 9783110271959.
• Carrington, A.; Hills, G. J.; Webb, K. R. (1974). "Neil Kensington Adam 1891–1973". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 20: 1–26. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1974.0001. JSTOR 769631.
• Giles, Peter (1912a). "Adam, James" . In Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 Supplement . pp. 11–14 – via Wikisource.
• Giles, Peter (1912b). "Neil, Robert Alexander" . In Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 Supplement . Vol. 3. pp. 1–2 – via Wikisource.
• Gill, David (2004). "Wace, Alan John Bayard (1879–1957)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/74552. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
• Maier, Bernhard (2009). William Robertson Smith: His Life, His Work and His Times. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. ISBN 9783161499951.
• Oakley, Ann (2011). A Critical Woman: Barbara Wootton, Social Science and Public Policy in the Twentieth Century. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 9781849664684.
• "Proceedings of the Numismatic Society: Session 1900–1901". The Numismatic Chronicle and Journal of the Numismatic Society. 4. 1: 1–35. 1901. JSTOR 42679755.
• Robinson, Annabel (2002). The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199242337.
• Schlesier, Renate (2015). Kulte, Mythen und Gelehrte: Anthropologie der Antike seit 1800 [Cults, Myths and Scholars: Anthropology of Antiquity Since 1800] (in German). Berlin: Fischer. ISBN 9783596119240.
• "Session 1900–1901". The Journal of Hellenic Studies. 21: xxxiii–xliv. 1901. JSTOR 623860.
• Smith, Dale M. (2 May 2017). "Harrison, Jane (1850–1928)". Routledge Encyclopaedia of Modernism. doi:10.4324/9781135000356-REM1347-1. Retrieved 27 December 2023.
• Wills, David (2015). "The Salonica Campaign of the First World War from an Archaeologist's Perspective: Alan J. B. Wace's Greece Untrodden (1964)" (PDF). Balkan Studies. 50: 139–157. Retrieved 23 October 2023.