William Gardner Hale (February 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 Uni