Born in
Providence, Rhode Island, Bennett graduated from
Brown University in 1878 and also studied at
Harvard (1881–1882) and in
Germany (1882–1884). He taught in secondary schools in
Florida (1878–1879),
New York (1879–1881), and
Nebraska (1885–1889), and became professor of
Latin in the
University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1889, of
classical philology at Brown University in 1891, and of Latin at Cornell University in 1892. His syntactical studies, notably various papers on the subjunctive, are based on a statistical examination of Latin texts and are marked by a fresh system of nomenclature; he ranks as one of the leaders of the New American School of syntacticians, who insist on a preliminary re-examination of all available data. Of great importance are his advocacy of quantitative reading of Latin verse and his
Critique of Some Recent Subjunctive Theories in vol. ix. (1898) of Cornell Studies in Classical Philology, of which he was an editor. Bennett's
Latin Grammar (1895) is the first successful attempt in America to adopt the method of the brief, scholarly
Schulgrammatik. Besides the Latin classics commonly read in secondary courses and other text-books in Bennett's
Latin Series, he edited
Tacitus's
Dialogus de Oratoribus (1894), and
Cicero's
De Senectute (1897) and
De Amicitia (1897). He wrote
The Teaching of Greek and Latin in Secondary Schools (1900), with
George P. Bristol, and
The Latin language, a historical outline of its sounds inflections, and syntax (1907), with
William Alexander Hammond, and translated
The Characters of Theophrastus (1902), and the
Loeb Classical Library edition of the
Odes and
Epodes of
Horace (1914). He was president of the
American Philological Association in 1907. He was elected to the
American Philosophical Society in 1913. ==Other publications==