On June 17, 1966, Robert F. Kennedy visited the Agora excavations in Athens with his wife, Ethel Skakel Kennedy; the day happened to be their sixteenth wedding anniversary and was almost exactly two years before his assassination. Ethel Kennedy seemed only marginally interested in what she saw and heard, hanging back near a vitrine close to the excavation tea table. Robert Kennedy, however, enthusiastically approached other visitors, full of questions about what Homer Thompson, the director of the excavations, had just shown him in the field. I was one of those other visitors, a member of the summer session of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Almost sixty years later I can still see the intense look in Kennedy’s eyes as he asked me my name, where I was studying, and whether I had read Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way. When I responded that I had not read the Hamilton book, a collection of essays on mythological, literary, archaeological, philosophical, and historical topics first published in 1930, a cloud of disbelief passed over Kennedy’s face as his interest in me waned. It was as if I had committed heresy or disgraced myself shamefully. I was a big disappointment. He briskly passed along to the next person with an eager question about the origins of democracy.
By the 1960s, Edith Hamilton’s books on Greece and Rome had been bestsellers in North America and the UK for decades, influential sources of information about classical antiquity and mythology for countless readers. But, as Victoria Houseman points out in her stirring, deeply researched biography, Edith Hamilton was considered a “popularizer,” even by herself, and thus not taken very seriously by academic classicists, historians and philologists. As a result, her books were not assigned in the classics departments of the most prestigious colleges and universities, and she had to wait until she was in her eighties beforeshe received recognition from the academic establishment. She had to wait, but The Echo of Greece (1957) was positively reviewed by three pillars of the academy, Richmond Lattimore of Bryn Mawr, C. A. Robinson Jr. of Brown, and Moses Hadas of Columbia. In 1959, Yale gave her an honorary doctorate.
This is the first major biography of this celebrated author. (An earlier, slender, study of Hamilton’s life by her younger companion, Doris Fielding Reid, appeared a few years after her death in 1963, but it lacked detail and depth.) Let us congratulate Princeton University Press for producing such an attractive, solid, meticulously edited volume (I noted one inconsequential typo on page 87). Victoria Houseman has dug deep into many aspects of her subject. The book presents us with a comprehensive timeline eighteen pages in length; an introduction; nineteen chapters chronicling Hamilton’s life and achievements; a conclusion; an appendix listing and describing friends of the subject; and a hundred pages of notes, bibliography, and index; photographs are scattered throughout. Houseman would seem to be following the dictum of Virginia Woolf that biography, if it is to succeed, should meld “granite-like solidity” of truth with a “rainbow-like intangibility”of personality.[1] The latter is harder to achieve than the former, but our biographer is to be commended for industrious research and an agreeably flowing prose style that sweeps us through the decades. If we are never provided a sufficiently crisp and resonant portrait of her subject’s personality, we perhaps have the private, somewhat remote Miss Hamilton herself to thank. To judge by the portrayal Houseman provides, Hamilton would probably have welcomed a sense, or aura, of the intangibility Woolf suggests a biography should provide, since there is scant evidence of wit or humor or indeed of self-reflection in what we learn about her personality. It seems she was serious and perhaps a bit dull, except when it came to praising Greek antiquity; that’s when she brightened. It should be noted also that the subtitle of the biography, “The Life and Loves of Edith Hamilton” may be somewhat misleading; the “loves” of her life were, after all, from everything we learn, simply Doris Fielding Reid, on the one hand, and her study of the Greeks, on the other, not joined by intimate affection for other people.
Born in Germany in 1867 when her American parents were pursuing studies in Dresden, Edith Hamilton accompanied them home to Fort Wayne, Indiana when she was two months old. Her father pursued business and banking ventures there, with varying degrees of success, although there always seemed to be sufficient funds in the family coffers. There were eventually four Hamilton girls (and a boy), all of them gifted and accomplished; Edith’s sister Alice, a specialist in public health and industrial medicine, was the first woman appointed to the faculty of Harvard. The family valued education highly, and in 1883 Edith, the eldest, entered Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, where Greek and Latin became essential courses of study for her. Bryn Mawr College then beckoned, and Edith enrolled there in 1891, soon becoming involved in student government, and endearing herself to faculty members, administrators, and fellow students alike. Her academic progress was swift and impressive and resulted in the conferral of classics B.A. and M.A. degrees in 1894; her impeccably philological M.A. thesis dealt with the use of the genitive case in Seneca (Stoic philosophy would continue to intrigue her in the years ahead). After a year studying in Germany at Leipzig and Munich, began her tenure as headmistress of the all-girls Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore in 1896, a position she would hold until 1922; in doing so she shunted aside the PhD she had long professed to desire. The description of Hamilton’s career at the Bryn Mawr School offers perhaps more detail than we need to know about this institution, its students and internal politics, and its place in Baltimore society. What is clear, however, is that Hamilton put her stamp indelibly on the school, establishing an institutional character that persists to this day.
Her retirement from teaching and administration freed Edith Hamilton to pursue her interest in Greek (and to a lesser extent, Roman) antiquity. She was intrigued by the “Greek miracle,” the achievements in particular of the fifth century B.C., when literary and material strides propelled Athens and Greece into a more advanced realm of civilization. Hamilton now had the leisure to translate tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles and to write essays that appeared in such journals as Theatre Arts Monthly. Her personal life, too, took on new dimensions, as she moved into a house in Gramercy Park in New York with Doris Fielding Reid, her former student, who would become her lifelong companion. The exact nature of the relationship between Hamilton and Reid remains unclear. Houseman writes (p. 53), “A physical element could be, but was not necessarily, present in the romantic friendships at Bryn Mawr.” This careful statement brings us to the sphere of the “Boston marriage,” to speculation and inference, to unprovable assumption, as there is so little specific evidence at our disposal. We think of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, and several other couples whose domestic arrangements imply a physical intimacy for which proof is lacking. In the case of another same-sex couple of the early 20th century, the Greek archaeologists Ida Thallon Hill and Elizabeth Pierce Blegen (both Vassar graduates), explicit correspondence between the two confirms our suspicions, and perhaps gives license to indulge in broad assumptions. (In the case of male same-sex relationships, the landscape is similarly shadowy, if not more so.) Whatever the precise nature of Hamilton’s intimate life with Reid, it is clear that their ongoing devotion was unquestioned and unbroken. They remained together until Hamilton’s death at age 95 in 1963; Reid, twenty-eight years younger, was 78 when she died in 1973.
The publication of The Greek Way started a veritable avalanche of books, essays, translations, and reviews by Hamilton that made her the most famous classicist of her age and led readers like Robert Kennedy and thousands of others to admire her depiction and interpretation of the Greeks and “the Greek way,” and to find inspiration in the culture they created and nurtured. Her own interests were not, however, limited to the Greek; appalled by the rise of Hitler, she turned to the prophets of the Hebrew Bible and wrote about Jewish contributions to Western culture (The Prophets of Israel, 1936). The Socratic dialogues of Plato heavily influenced her thinking, as they had since her undergraduate days, when she read such scholars as Walter Pater, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and Edward Caird, none of them known as classicists primarily. Paul Shorey of Bryn Mawr at the time and the Oxford scholar and public intellectual Gilbert Murray were other influences, but it is odd that Hamilton seems not to have immersed herself in conventional classical scholarship as enthusiastically as she followed the intellectual trail of contemporary literary, cultural and theater critics such as John Mason Brown and Brooks Atkinson, both of whom were her friends (earlier, in her Baltimore days, she had befriended a certain Gertrude Stein, who was studying medicine at Johns Hopkins). Another of her dear friends was Ezra Pound, whose moral failings she somehow was able to overlook. After Hamilton and Reid moved to Washington, D.C. in 1943 to further Reid’s career as a stockbroker, politicians and journalists joined their circle, such people as Joseph Alsop, Senator Ralph Flanders (who helped bring down Joseph McCarthy), Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Huntington Cairns, secretary-treasurer of the National Gallery of Art, and the journalist Felix Morley, who was one of their closest companions and who, years later, described the relationship of the two women as “the perfect friendship.” Yes, maybe.
Edith Hamilton died just a few years after having been honored with the conferral of Athenian citizenship and the Gold Cross of the Legion of Benefaction in a ceremony in the Odeion of Herodes Atticus on the south slope of the Acropolis, the occasion also including a performance of her translation of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. She considered the evening the greatest triumph of her long life. And she had earned such accolades. Her writings on the Greeks and Greek literature and philosophy had informed – as they continue to inform – untold numbers of readers, in ways that learned academics and their publications cannot. “Popularizer” is definitely not a pejorative when applied to Hamilton. Her idiomatic translations of Greek tragedies, especially Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, have received numerous productions over the years, drawing theatergoers into the fraught, yet inspiring, world of the ancient Greeks. Her several books on Greek and Roman mythology, rather chatty and surprisingly informal, take the reader into her confidence, as it were, about the nature and humanity of literature. It is really no surprise that she has been so popular. And it is perhaps foolish to wish we had a better handle on her personality. In this (surely) definitive biography you can find a remarkable photograph of Edith Hamilton that is also reproduced on the dust jacket. Taken by Gjon Mili for Life magazine at her summer house in Maine when she was 91, it shows Hamilton looking straight into the camera, a glass raised to the onlooker, with the hint of a smile forming on her patrician features, as if she’s about to say, “Here’s to the Greeks.”
Notes
[1] Virginia Woolf, “The New Biography,” (1927) The Essays of Virginia Woolf vol. 4, ed. A. McNeillie, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1994, 473–480.