Edith Hamilton (August 12, 1867 – May 31, 1963) was an American educator and internationally known author who was one of the most renowned classicists of her era in the United States. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College, she also studied in Germany at Leipzig University and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Hamilton began her career as an educator and head of the Bryn Mawr School, a private college preparatory school for girls in Baltimore, Maryland; however, Hamilton is best known for her essays and best-selling books on ancient Greek and Roman civilizations.
Hamilton's second career as an author began after she retired from the Bryn Mawr School in 1922. She was sixty-two years old when her first book, The Greek Way, was published in 1930. It was an immediate success and a featured selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1957. Hamilton's other notable works include The Roman Way (1932), The Prophets of Israel (1936), Mythology (1942), and The Echo of Greece (1957).
Critics have acclaimed Hamilton's books for their lively interpretations of ancient cultures. She is described as the classical scholar who "brought into clear and brilliant focus the Golden Age of Greek life and thought ... with Homeric power and simplicity in her style of writing".
Edith's grandfather, Allen Hamilton, was an Irish immigrant who came to Indiana in 1823 by way of Canada and settled in Fort Wayne. In 1828 he married Emerine Holman, the daughter of Indiana Supreme Court Justice Jesse Lynch Holman. Allen Hamilton became a successful Fort Wayne businessman and a land speculator. Much of the city of Fort Wayne was built on land he once owned. The Hamilton family's large estate on a three-block area of downtown Fort Wayne included three homes. The family also built a home at Mackinac Island, Michigan, where they spent many of their summers. For the most part, the second and third generations of the extended Hamilton family, which included Edith's family, as well as her uncles, aunts, and cousins, lived on inherited wealth.
Montgomery Hamilton, a scholarly man of leisure, was one of Allen and Emerine (Holman) Hamilton's eleven children; however, only five of the siblings lived. Her father attended Princeton University and Harvard Law School and also studied in Germany. Montgomery met Gertrude Pond, the daughter of a wealthy Wall Street broker and sugar importer, while living in Germany. They were married in 1866. Montgomery Hamilton became a partner in a wholesale grocery business in Fort Wayne, but the partnership dissolved in 1885 and the business failure caused a financial loss for the family. Afterwards, Montgomery Hamilton retreated from public life. Edith's mother, Gertrude, who loved modern literature and spoke several languages, remained socially active in the community and had "wide cultural and intellectual interests."
Edith was the oldest of five siblings that included three sisters (Alice (1869–1970), Margaret (1871–1969), and Norah (1873–1945)) and a brother (Arthur "Quint" (1886–1967)), all of whom were accomplished in their respective fields. Edith became an educator and renowned author; Alice became a founder of industrial medicine; Margaret, like her older sister, Edith, became an educator and headmistress at Bryn Mawr School; and Norah was an artist. Hamilton's youngest sibling, Arthur, was nineteen years her junior. He became a writer, professor of Spanish, and assistant dean for foreign students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Arthur was the only sibling to marry; he and his wife, Mary Neal (d. 1965), had no children.
Education
thumb|Edith Hamilton in graduation cap and gown
Because Edith's parents disliked the public school system's curriculum, they taught their children at home. Edith, who learned to read at an early age, became an excellent storyteller. Hamilton credited her father for guiding her towards studies of the classics; he began teaching her Latin when she was seven years old. Her father also introduced her to Greek language and literature, where her mother taught the Hamilton children French and had them tutored in German.
Hamilton returned to Indiana in 1886 and began four years of preparation prior to her acceptance at Bryn Mawr College near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1891. She majored in Greek and Latin and was awarded a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts degree in 1894. Hamilton spent the year after her graduation as a fellow in Latin at Bryn Mawr College and was awarded the Mary E. Garrett European Fellowship, the college's highest honor. The cash award from Bryn Mawr provided funds to enable Edith and Alice, who had completed her medical degree at the University of Michigan in 1893, to pursue further studies in Germany for an academic year. Hamilton became the first woman to enroll at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
Studies in Germany
In the fall of 1895 the Hamilton sisters departed for Germany, where Alice intended to continue her studies in pathology at Leipzig University and Edith planned to study the classics and attend lectures. At that time, most North American women, including Edith and Alice, registered as auditors for their classes. When the sisters arrived at Leipzig University, they found a fair number of foreign women who studied there. They were informed that women could attend lectures, but they were expected to remain "invisible" and would not be allowed to participate in discussions. As a result, they decided to enroll at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, but it was not much of an improvement. Initially, it was uncertain whether Edith would be allowed to audit lectures, but she was granted permission to do so, albeit under trying conditions. Edith is quoted as saying, "the head of the University used to stare at me, then shake his head and say sadly to a colleague, 'There now, you see what's happened? We're right in the midst of the woman question.'"
In 1906, Hamilton's accomplishments as an educator and administrator were recognized when she was named the first headmistress in the school's history. Her insistence on offering challenging standards to the students and different options on school policies led to confrontations with Dean Thomas. As Hamilton became increasingly frustrated with the situation at the school, her health also declined. She retired in 1922 at the age of fifty-four, after twenty-six years of service to the school.
Classicist and author
After retiring as an educator in 1922 and moving to New York City in 1924, Hamilton began a second career as an author of essays and best-selling books on ancient Greek and Roman civilizations. She had studied Greek and Latin from her youth and it remained her lifelong interest. "I came to the Greeks early," Hamilton told an interviewer when she was ninety-one, "and I found answers in them. Greece's great men let all their acts turn on the immortality of the soul. We don't really act as if we believed in the soul's immortality and that's why we are where we are today." The successful book, which Hamilton wrote at the urging of Elling Annestad, an editor at W. W. Norton Company, made her a well-known author in the United States. The bestseller drew comparisons between ancient Greece and modern-day life with essays about some of the great figures of Athenian history and literature. Critically praised for its "vivid and graceful prose," the book brought Hamilton immediate acclaim and established her reputation as a scholar.
In Hamilton's view, Greek civilization at its peak represented a "flowering of the mind" that has yet to be equaled in the history of the world. The Greek Way showed that the Greeks recognized and appreciated such things as love, athletic games, love of knowledge, fine arts, and intelligent conversation.
More recent writers have used Hamilton's observations in contrasting the civilizations and cultures of the East with that of the West. In comparing ancient Egypt with Greece, for instance, Hamilton's writing describes the unique geography, climate, agriculture, and government. Historian James Golden cites from The Greek Way that "Egyptian society was preoccupied with death." Its pharaohs erected giant monuments to themselves to impress future generations and its priests advised the slaves to "look forward to an afterlife." Golden used Hamilton's research to contrast these differences with the Greeks, especially the Athenians. Hamilton argued that individual "perfection of mind and body" dominated Greek thought and as a result, the Greeks "excelled at philosophy and sports" and that life "in all its exuberant potential" was the hallmark of Greek civilization.
Hamilton also summarized the importance of that connection to people in modern times: "Love and grief and joy remain the same forever beautiful" and "poetic truth is always true" as are truths of the spirit. "The prophets understand them as no men have more, and in their pages we can find ourselves. Our aspirations are there, our desires for humanity." A subsequent edition of the book, Spokesmen for God: The Great Teachers of the Old Testament (Norton, 1949), supplied additional commentary on the first five books of the Old Testament. Christian Science historian Robert Peel described it as "a work of sheer delight."
thumb|Many editions of Hamilton's magnum opus
;Mythology
John Mason Brown, American drama critic, praised Hamilton's The Greek Way, placing it at the top among modern-day written about ancient Greece," and Mythology as "incomparably superior to Thomas Bulfinch's work on the subject.
;Later works
In 1942, after moving to Washington, D.C., Hamilton continued to write. At the age of eighty-two she offered new perspectives on the New Testament in Witness to the Truth: Christ and His Interpreters (1948) and produced a sequel to The Greek Way, titled The Echo of Greece (1957). Reid was the daughter of geophysicist and Johns Hopkins geology professor Harry Fielding Reid and writer Edith Gittings Reid, who authored biographical studies of William Osler, William Sydney Thayer, and Woodrow Wilson. Hamilton first met Reid as a student at the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore, where Hamilton served as headmistress; later accounts describe Reid as both a former pupil and an intimate friend of Hamilton's.
After Hamilton retired from the Bryn Mawr School and began her second career as a writer, she and Reid established a shared household and moved together between New York City, Maine, and Washington, D.C.
Reid died in 1973.
Later years
Hamilton and Doris Reid remained in New York City until 1943, then moved to Washington, D.C., and spent their summers in Maine. In Washington, Reid was in charge of the local offices of Loomis, Sayles and Company, an investment firm that had been her employer since 1929; Hamilton continued to write and frequently entertained friends, fellow writers, government representatives, and other dignitaries at her home. Among the eminent and famous were Isak Dinesen, Robert Frost, Harvard classicist Werner Jaeger and labor leader John L. Lewis.
thumb|The Parthenon
Hamilton considered the high point of her life to be a trip to Greece at age 90 in 1957, where, in Athens, she saw her translation of Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound performed at the ancient Odeon theater of Herodes Atticus. As part of the evening's ceremonies, King Paul of Greece awarded the Golden Cross of the Order of Benefaction—one of Greece's highest honors—to her. The mayor of Athens made her an honorary citizen of the city. Hamilton called the ceremony "the proudest moment of my life."
Modern influences
Many of the facts in The Greek Way (1930) have surprised modern readers. One reviewer in Australia explained Hamilton's view "that the spirit of our age is a Greek discovery, and that the Greeks were really the first Westerners, and the first intellectualists." The same reviewer also credited the book with noting that modern concepts of play and sport were actually common activities to the Greeks, who engaged in exercise and athletic events, including games, races, and music, dancing, and wrestling competitions, among others.
Among those whose lives were influenced by Hamilton's writings was U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy. In the months after his brother, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated, Robert was consumed with grief. Former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy gave him a copy of The Greek Way, which she felt was certain to help him. Political commentator David Brooks reported that Hamilton's essays helped him better understand and then recover from his brother's tragic death. Hamilton's writings remained important to him over time, as Brooks explains, and changed Kennedy's life. "He carried his beaten, underlined and annotated copy around with him for years, reading sections aloud to audiences in a flat, unrhythmic voice with a mournful edge" and could recite from memory various passages of Aeschylus that Hamilton had translated. The views of the prophets, it adds, are very similar to those in modern times: "The prophets were forerunners of three genuinely American movementshumanism, pragmatism and the philosophy of common sense." where Hamilton's sisters had retired, in the same cemetery as Hamilton's mother (Gertrude), sisters (Alice, Norah, and Margaret), and Margaret's life partner, Clara Landsberg.
Hamilton received the National Achievement Award in 1951 as a distinguished classical scholar and author. She received the award along with Anna M. Rosenberg, Assistant Secretary of Defense. The award was created in 1930 to honor women of accomplishment and inspire others.
Hamilton was awarded the Golden Cross of the Order of Benefaction, Greece's highest honor, and became an honorary citizen of the city in 1957. Kennedy also incorporated another line from Hamilton's writing, "her representation of an ancient Greek inscription" in his closing remarks to the crowd: "Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago––to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world."
In 2000 the city of Fort Wayne, Indiana, erected statues of two Hamilton sisters, Edith and Alice, along with their cousin, Agnes, in the city's Headwaters Park.
- Three Greek Plays (1937)
- The Ever Present Past (1964), collected essays and reviews