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Introduction I have had some success in tracing the early life of prof. Norman Wentworth Dewitt, born September 18, 1876 in the small hamlet of Tweedside, Ontario, on the Niagara Peninsula. An early ancestor was Nicholas de Witt, born 1594 in East Frisia. Nicholas was a Doctor, and in that capacity is alleged to have accompanied Henry Hudson in his exploration of the Hudson River as Ship's Doctor on the Half-Moon. Nicholas de Witt had a son Tjerck Claeszen de Witt, who emigrated without his fath…

(Quote) It's beside your main point, but what I'm finding in my research is that his academic interest in Epicureanism may stem from later in his career than I realized. There is, first, his dissertation for Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago; a study of the erotic in "The Dido Episode in the Aeneid of Virgil", 1907. He surveys the literature of Greece and Rome in laying the groundwork for his thesis, but one figure is curiously absent: Lucretius. Excluding the above, his next six…

DeWitt can be intentionally classicizing in his prose, as here in his description of Canada: Since he published this article in The Classical Weekly his intended readers cannot have failed to notice the allusion. It is to Julius Caesar's De Bello Gallico, "Of the War in Gaul": (Quote) What exactly did he mean to convey by this? Perhaps that Canada and its partially French (i.e. Gallic) heritage stand in relation to a southern empire governed as a republic, and that both province and empire are r…