Capps's Princeton colleagues were soon impressed by his abundant energy and his loyalty to his beliefs and friends. As a member of the faculty committee on the graduate school, he sided with Wilson in the Wilson-West controversy over the location of the graduate college, taking a vigorous part in debate at faculty meetings and supporting Wilson to the end. One of the founders of the American Association of University Professors, he was a leader during its first fight for academic freedom and served for a temn as its president. He was also president of the American Philological Association.
He was the first American editor of the Loeb Classical Library, the series of texts of classical authors with English translations, regarded in the profession as a notable achievement of American scholarship.
Most of his adult life Capps was closely identified with Greece. ``With Lord Byron removed from the field,'' the Alumni Weekly once said, ``Professor Capps would win any contest for `best-known foreigner in Greece.''' He first went there in the fall of 1893 as a member of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and the following spring took part in the School's excavation of the theater at ancient Eretria. He returned to Athens for further study in 1903, this time deciphering and collating a series of tablets about the theater, which also contained important data on that city's military and political history.
At the end of the First World War, Capps spent two years in Greece as American Red Cross Commissioner and another year as United States Minister to Greece, on appointment of President Wilson. During this period, he played a leading role in the founding of Athens College, which later named a building in his honor, citing him as an ``inspiring teacher of Greek life and letters . . . and for nearly half a century a champion of friendship between Greece and America.''
Capps was chairman of the managing committee of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens for twenty years. In this capacity he organized the most spectacular of all American archaeological ventures, the excavation of the Agora of ancient Athens, securing the Greek government's necessary cooperation, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.'s financial support, and Professor T. Leslie Shear's expert services as director. He was influential in obtaining the gift of the Gennadius Library, which made the School an international center of Byzantine and Neo-Hellenic studies.
Following his retirement from the University in 1935, he served as acting director of the American School in Athens for a year, and was then visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study for five years. Thereafter he continued to work on the Loeb Classical Library and to read his favorite Greek authors with students who met with him at his home on Mercer Street. Shortly before his eightieth birthday he went to Oxford to accept a Doctor of Letters degree honoris causa; he had previously been honored by Illinois College, Oberlin, Harvard, Michigan, and Athens, and had been twice decorated by the Greek government.
At the centennial of his first alma mater, Illinois College, his family and friends founded there the Edward Capps chair of Greek and Latin.