Edith Hamilton

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Edith Hamilton (1867-1963) was an excellent teacher, scholar, and writer. She was a gifted storyteller and had a phenomenal memory. Starting at the age of 63, Hamilton published a number of acclaimed books on Greek and Roman culture, was made an honorary citizen of Athens, and was awarded several honorary doctorates.

Edith Hamilton was born in Dresden, Germany, on August 12, 1867, while her mother was visiting relatives. After two months her mother returned with her to the United States, but thereafter, many people thought that she was of German extraction. Her great grandfather, the first of the family to come to North America, was the youngest son of a branch of the wealthy Hamilton family of Northern Ireland. Realizing that as the youngest son, he would not inherit much, he immigrated to Canada. His genteel status was not suited to manual labor, but he finally landed a job as a deck hand on one of the flat-bottomed boats used on frontier rivers and canals. On one such trip, he apparently jumped ship at Fort Wayne, Indiana, which was then part of Canada. He bought large tracts of land cheaply, and eventually became very wealthy. Hamilton sent for his son, Allen, from Northern Ireland.

Allen's son, Montgomery, married Gertrude Pond. Montgomery, Edith Hamilton's father, who never worked a day in his life, was a voracious reader and an educated man but was interested mainly in literature and religious heresies. According to his daughter, he was a horrible teacher. Her mother encouraged Hamilton to play outdoors and to learn foreign languages.

Hamilton, the eldest of five children from an exceptionally gifted intellectual family, was raised on a family estate with many servants, many relatives, and no need for outsiders. She was withdrawn, intense, moody, and somewhat depressive. However, she was also caring, a gifted storyteller, and had a phenomenal memory. She learned French at an early age from her mother and German from servants. Her father taught her Latin at the age of seven and Greek at eight. She was also a voracious reader, but was especially interested in ancient Greece. Her sister Alice says of her in Edith Hamilton: An Intimate Portrait, by Doris Fielding Reid, "Edith had intense emotions. She had her times of joyous gaiety over the beauties of the outside world or a new book or some amusing family episode, but she had her sudden deep depressions that mystified me."

Determined to be Educated

At the age of 16, Hamilton attended school for the first time at Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut, along with her three sisters, Alice, Margaret, and Norah. About this experience, Hamilton stated, "We weren't taught anything." Since all courses were elective, a young woman did not have to take any she was weak in or did not like.

Hamilton decided to attend Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, even though Miss Porter did not believe in college for women, and her family objected strenuously. It was necessary for Hamilton to study subjects not taught at Miss Porter's School, such as trigonometry, which Hamilton taught herself from a book, in order to pass the college entrance examination.

While at Bryn Mawr, Hamilton successfully fought against a rule that smoking would automatically lead to expulsion. She majored in classics and finished in two years with a Master of Arts degree in 1894. She was awarded the European Fellowship given to the most outstanding woman in the graduating class to enable her to study for a year in any foreign country.

Travel and Study Abroad

In 1895, Hamilton traveled with her sister Alice, who had recently become a doctor, to Germany. She and Alice were the first women at the universities of Leipzig and Munich. They first studied at the University of Leipzig, where Hamilton was very disappointed in the sterility of the Greek and Roman courses. Although her professors were linguistically highly proficient, she felt they failed to see the bigger picture concerning what the ancient writers were saying. After several months of studying the grammar of the ancient Greek texts, Hamilton left Leipzig with her sister to attend the University of Munich. Her sister writes of the effect her admission to Munich had on the formerly all male bastion. "Her admission to the University was a cause of such excitement among the students that a kind, elderly professor offered to see her through it on her first day." All sorts of suggestions were floated on how to avoid contamination with the sole woman on the campus. "Finally, it came to a chair up on the lecturer's platform, where nobody could be contaminated by contact with her." Of course, this had the effect of making poor Hamilton even more conspicuous. She wrote that the head of the University used to look at her and shake his head sadly, while muttering about the "woman question."

Nevertheless, Hamilton liked being at Munich and enjoyed the notoriety. She felt that the professors there were much more interesting and kinder to her. She stated that one "treated me as if he actually liked having me there!" She might have stayed at Munich and earned her Ph.D. if two events had not happened. First, her father lost his money. At the same time, the dean of Bryn Mawr College, Miss M. Carey Thomas, offered her a position as headmistress of the Bryn Mawr Preparatory School in Baltimore, Maryland.

Frightened but Frightening

When Hamilton arrived at the school in the autumn of 1896 at the age of 29, she was the first headmistress. Previously, a secreatry who reported to the dean at Bryn Mawr College had run the school. Not only had she no experience at running the only college preparatory school in the area, but she was a northerner and was faced with parents who did not necessarily believe that young women needed a real education. Hamilton remembered: "I was very young and very ignorant when I first came to Baltimore and, I may say, very, very, frightened. I remember vividly saying to myself as I traveled down here, 'If I were put in charge of running this train, I could hardly know less how to do it than I know how to run the Bryn Mawr School."'

If she were frightened, the impression she gave her children was terrifying. She was a remote eminence, but exacting and demanding. In spite of this, many remember her fondly. She instilled in them a love of learning and an ability to persevere, which she found in ancient Greek literature. Hamilton said, "Nothing effortless was among the good things the early Greeks wanted. A wise and witty writer has said that the spirit of American education today is if at first you don't succeed, try something else. That spirit has never invaded our school." She also believed in the importance of the individual rather than of the aggregate.

Hamilton was headmistress of this school of approximately 400 students until 1922. She loved teaching, but too rarely had the opportunity. She apparently was an excellent teacher, able to inspire students with her love of learning. The fondest memories of her students revolve around her courses. One suggested Hamilton's classes were the highlight of her intellectual life. Another aspect of Hamilton's tenure was that she was highly religious and frequently quoted scriptural passages to her students. Finally, after 26 years, she was tired of her work and decided that it was time to retire. So it reads in her official biography by Doris Fielding Reid. However, a New York Times article of March 22, 1922, states that President Thon of Bryn Mawr College denied reports that she forced Hamilton to retire.

Bullied Into Writing

Hamilton's retirement led to a whole new career. She acquired a retreat at Sea Wall, Mt. Desert Island, Maine, where she would spend summers for 40 years with the future author of her official biography, her friend and former student, Doris Fielding Reid. Hamilton loved the outdoors and the wildness of Sea Wall's ocean and mountains. In the autumn of 1924, Hamilton moved into Reid's New York apartment for the winter and for all the subsequent 20 winters. Visitors were frequently entertained there. At one such meeting, a friend asked her to talk about the ancient Greek writers of tragedy Aeschylus, Hamilton's favorite, Sophocles and Euripides. Thereafter, the group met regularly, and Hamilton held court. After one such meeting, Rosamond Gilder, the editor of Theatre Arts Monthly, suggested she write about Greek tragedies for her magazine. At first, Hamilton refused, but finally prodded beyond endurance, she wrote an article and sent it off. After being published with high praise, she sent off several more articles. She was told, "You are that unusual combination, a gifted talker and a gifted writer. To be a gifted talker can be fatal to a writer."

The articles she wrote for Theatre Arts Monthly were remade into a book, The Greek Way, published in 1930, when she was 63 years old. Two years later, she published The Roman Way. Both books showed the relationship of ancient life to the present and are considered classics in their own right. When asked why she started writing books at an age when most people thought only of retirement, she said, "I was bullied into it."

Besides continuing to write articles, she also wrote further books, including The Prophets of Israel (W.W. Norton, 1936), Three Greek Plays (W.W. Norton, 1937), The Great Age of Greek Literature (W.W. Norton, 1942), Mythology (Little, Brown and Company, 1943), Witness to the Truth: Christ and His Interpreters (W.W. Norton, 1948), Spokesmen for God: the Great Teachers of the Old Testament (W.W. Norton, 1949), The Echo of Greece (W.W. Norton, 1957), The Age of Heroes: An Introduction to Greek Mythology (McClelland, 1957), The Collected Dialogues of Plato (Princeton University Press, 1961), and The Ever-Present Past (W.W. Norton), published posthumously in 1964.

Determined to Survive

While spending winters in Washington, D.C., from 1943 to 1963, Hamilton met many litterati, including novelist Isak Dinesen, historian Arnold Toynbee, and poets Robert Frost and Ezra Pound. In 1955, she was elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1957 became member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1957, at the age of 90, Hamilton was invited to Athens where she was given the Gold Cross of the Legion of Benefaction by King Paul of Greece, and made an honorary citizen of Athens. In 1958, she was awarded the Constance Lindsay Skinner Award for literature. Between 1949 and 1962, Hamilton was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Rochester (1949), the University of Pennsylvania (1953), Yale University (1959), and Goucher College (1962).

Near the end of her life, she suffered a stroke from which her doctor said she would never recover. He told Reid, "You must face the fact that Miss Hamilton will never walk again and never talk again." At that instant, Hamilton opened her eyes and said "Pooh!" She recovered. She spent the following summer at Sea Wall in Maine, where she celebrated her 95th birthday. A week before she died, Hamilton decided to try to finish a book on the Greek philosopher, Plato. She passed away peacefully on May 31, 1963, in Washington, D.C.

Books

Reid, Doris Fielding, Edith Hamilton: An Intimate Portrait, W.W. Norton and Co., 1967.

Online

Browning, Benita, "Edith Hamilton," Department of History at IPFW,http://www.ipfw.edu (November 8, 2001).

"Edith Hamilton," Distinguished Women of Past and Present,http://www.distinguishedwomen.com (November 8, 2001).

(1867-1963), writer, classicist, and educator. Edith Hamilton, a popular and influential interpreter of ancient civilizations, grew up with the classics. Born into a cultured Fort Wayne, Indiana, family, Hamilton started studying Latin at seven, memorized poetry and long passages from the Bible, and even as a girl was a "natural storyteller." (Physician and reformer Alice Hamilton was her sister.) After receiving her B.A. and M.A. from Bryn Mawr College (1894), she studied classics in Germany. From 1896 to 1922 she was headmistress of the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore, a rigorous college preparatory school for girls that she built into a thriving institution. To her students, she seemed "a figure of high, mysterious power." They were awed by her standards of excellence, dramatic interviews, and her senior class in Virgil.

Encouraged to write by friends whom she had electrified with her readings and interpretations of Greek tragedies, Hamilton published The Greek Way in 1930 (revised 1942) at the age of sixty-two. It was the first of nine books, which included a volume of translations (Three Greek Plays [1937]), the popular Mythology (1942), and the coedited Bollingen Collected Dialogues of Plato (1961). The Greek Way set the pattern for all her work: personal readings of ancient texts that highlighted what she considered eternal "truths of the spirit" and the contemporaneity of the past. To Hamilton, the Greeks were "the first Westerners," the "discoverers" of freedom who combined mind and spirit and whose achievements had never been surpassed. After publishing The Roman Way (1932), a less congenial subject, she moved on to the Bible. In The Prophets of Israel (1936, revised in 1949 as Spokesmen for God) and Witness to the Truth (1948), she praised the moral insights of the Old Testament prophets and "the living Jesus"; these unconventional seekers after truth rather than the orthodox were her heroes.

Hamilton catapulted to celebrity status in her nineties. In 1957 she was made an honorary citizen of Athens in a dramatic ceremony in the Theatre of Herodes Atticus, which was followed by a reading of her translation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound. Book-of-the-Month Club editions, admiring articles in the press, and television interviews followed. Her late writings, with their low-keyed critique of mass education, proclaimed the relevance of ancient history "for the Atomic Age." The Echo of Greece (1957) depicted fourth-century Athens as a waning civilization in which liberty degenerated into license and the desire for security overcame the will to defend freedom, themes that also appeared in essays and talks posthumously collected in The Ever-Present Past (1964). Hamilton herself seemed as ageless as the Greeks she portrayed, no doubt a large part of her appeal as a public figure.

Although praised during her lifetime for their lucidity and wisdom, her books are dismissed by modern scholars because of her unsubstantiated personal and anachronistic interpretations of ancient texts. But her fan mail and enormous sales attest to the great pleasure they gave readers, to some of whom she became a virtual cult figure. She was taken seriously by many writers, intellectuals, and politicians, including the Kennedy family. Hamilton was essentially an inspirational writer whose enthusiasm for the past was contagious. Her personal conviction and intimate style--"She talks about Aeschylus exactly as though he were her eldest son!"--demystified the classics for readers who no longer knew them firsthand.

Bibliography:

Alice Hamilton, Exploring the Dangerous Trades (1943); Doris Fielding Reid, Edith Hamilton: An Intimate Portrait (1967).

Author:

Barbara Sicherman

See also Hamilton, Alice.

Quotes:

"When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again."

"Mind and spirit together make up that which separates us from the rest of the animal world, that which enables a man to know the truth and that which enables him to die for the truth."

"A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can."

"The fundamental fact about the Greek was that he had to use his mind. The ancient priests had said, Thus far and no farther. We set the limits of thought. The Greek said, All things are to be examined and called into question. There are no limits set on thought."

"Theories that go counter to the facts of human nature are foredoomed."

"None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry."

See more famous quotes by Edith Hamilton

Edith Hamilton
Born	August 12, 1867(1867-08-12) Dresden, Germany
Died	May 31, 1963 (aged 95) Washington, DC
Occupation	Classical scholar, author
Writing period	1930-1957
Subjects	Ancient Greece, Greek philosophy, Mythology

Edith Hamilton (12 August 1867–31 May 1963) was an American educator and author who was “recognized as the greatest woman Classicist”. She was sixty-two years old when The Greek Way, her first book, was published in 1930. It was instantly successful, and is the earliest expression of her belief in “the calm lucidity of the Greek mind” and “that the great thinkers of Athens were unsurpassed in their mastery of truth and enlightenment”. ^[1]

In 1957, when the Book-of-the-Month Club selected The Greek Way (1930) as a featured book, it enhanced her efforts at directing the American mind towards Ancient Greece, despite it having been published twenty-seven years earlier. Moreover, by then, she already had published other books, among them The Roman Way (1932), Mythology (1942), and The Echo of Greece (1957); to date, in at the high school- and university-level, Mythology remains the premier introductory text about its subject. The New York Times has described her 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”. ^[1]

Contents 1 Early life and education 1.1 Childhood 1.2 Studying in Germany 2 Career 2.1 Educator 2.2 Classical author 3 Personal life 4 Recognition 5 Works 6 References 7 External links

Early life and education

Childhood

Edith Hamilton was born in Dresden, Germany, to Gertrude Pond Hamilton and Montgomery Hamilton, a scholarly man of leisure; she also had two sisters, Alice and Margaret. Describing her Fort Wayne, Indiana, childhood, she said, “My father was well-to-do, but he wasn't interested in making money; he was interested in making people use their minds”; thus, her father guided her towards the Classics, and, when she was seven years old, he began teaching her Latin, then French, German, and Greek. ^[1]

In the early 1880s, she attended Miss Porter’s Finishing School for Young Ladies in Farmington, Connecticut, afterwards attending Bryn Mawr College, in Pennsylvania; upon earning her B.A. and M.A. degrees, she took the Grand Tour of Europe, to allow the schooling to become an education.

Studying in Germany

In 1895 Edith and her sister Alice traveled to Germany to study humanities and classics at the University of Munich, recognized as a center in classical studies. At the time, most North American women chose to register as auditors and Edith and Alice were among the first women to audit classes. Their adventures in Germany have been well preserved and publicized in Alice's autobiography. ^[2]:45-46

Leipzig

According to education historian Sandra Singer, "The sisters' first destination was the University of Leipzig. Edith had just graduated in classics from Bryn Mawr and was recipient of a European fellowship, while her sister Alice had recently completed her medical degree at the University of Michigan (1893)." ^[3] When they arrived in Leipzig, they found a fair number of foreign women studying at the university. They were told that they could attend lectures but would not be able to participate in discussions. Alice had come to Germany to continue her studies in pathology. Edith, however, had come to Germany to study classics, and attended the lectures.

According to Alice, Edith was extremely disappointed with the lectures she attended. The lectures were thorough, but lost sight of the beauty of literature by focusing on obscure grammatical points. "Instead of the grandeur and beauty of Aeschylus and Sophocles, it seemed that the important thing was their use of the second aorist," she said.^[2]

Munich

When the sisters discovered that women were still not allowed to earn a doctoral degree at Leipzig, they decided to try their luck at the University of Munich. As it turned out, notes Sandra Singer, "Munich was hardly much of an improvement over Leipzig for Edith. At first it was unclear whether Edith would be able to audit lectures at all . . . [but] she was finally able to attend lectures, because there was tension within the classics department between the Protestants and the Catholics." The Protestants supported Edith and she was allowed to attend classes, albeit under trying conditions. According to Singer, "She had been told that a little alcove would be built in the lecture hall where she could sit behind a green curtain."^[3]

But as Alice writes in her autobiography, when Edith arrived, "she was forced instead to sit on a chair up on the platform beside the lecturer, facing the audience, so that nobody would be contaminated by contact with her." She remembered Edith 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.' " ^[2]

Career

Educator

Edith intended nonetheless to remain in Munich and earn a doctoral degree, but her plans changed. She was persuaded to return to the United States to take over as head of the recently opened Bryn Mawr Preparatory School for Girls in Baltimore. While she never completed her doctoral degree, she did become an "inspiring and respected head of the school for twenty six years."^[3]

Classical author

"I came to the Greeks early," Hamilton told an interviewer when she was 91, "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."^[1]

Upon retiring, she moved to New York City and wrote and published various articles about Greek drama. Although she was long recognized as the greatest woman classicist, she was 62 when she published her first book, The Greek Way, in 1930. For 50 years before that her "love affair with Greece had smoldered without literary outlet."^[1]

Her approach to mythology was entirely through the literature of the classics, for she had not traveled to Greece and was not an archaeologist. The Greek Way drew informative comparisons between life in ancient Greece and current Greek life. The Roman Way (1932) provided similar contrasts between daily life in ancient Rome and the current life. Other works published over the next three decades led to her traveling to Greece in 1957 at the age of ninety.

But although her books were successful, she "nevertheless saw that it was hopeless to persuade Americans to be Greeks. In The Greek Way she conceded that life had become far too complex since the age of Pericles to recapture the simple directness of Greek life. . . the calm lucidity of the Greek mind, which convinced the great thinkers of Athens of their mastery of truth and enlightenment."^[1]

Edith Hamilton's correspondence and papers are at Princeton University. She is the subject of a memoir by Reid, Edith Hamilton: An Intimate Portrait.

Personal life

Her sister, Alice, went on to become an integral part of Hull House, in Chicago, which offered food, shelter, and education, as a charity on the part of wealthy donors and scholars who volunteered their time. She later became a noted "pioneer in industrial medicine and a professor at Northwestern University and Harvard Medical School, where in 1919 she became Harvard's first woman professor.

Her younger sister, Margaret, also studied in Munich for one summer in 1899 with a close college and family friend, Clara Landsberg. Landsberg was from Rochester, New York, where her father was a Reform rabbi. After graduating from Bryn Mawr, Landsberg also became a part of Hull House and shared a room with Alice. She eventually left Hull House to teach Latin at the Bryn Mawr while Edith was headmistress. Alice considered Landsberg part of the Hamilton family: "I could not think of a life in which Clara did not have a great part, she has become part of my life almost as if she were one of us."^[2] Margaret later taught English at Bryn Mawr and took over as head of the school when Edith retired.

Recognition

In 1950 she received the honorary degrees of Doctor of Letters from the University of Rochester and the University of Pennsylvania. She was also a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.^[4]

She considered the high point of her life to be a ceremony in Greece when she stood in the theater of Herodes Atticus and King Paul of Greece awarded her the Golden Cross of the Order of Benefaction, making her an honorary citizen of Athens. Nodding to the applause of cabinet ministers, diplomats and Athenian intellectuals, "she walked to the microphone and in a firm voice cried, 'I am an Athenian citizen! I am an Athenian citizen! This is the proudest moment in all my life.'"^[1]

Works

• The Greek Way (1930)
• The Roman Way (1932)
• The Prophets of Israel (1936)
• Three Greek Plays (1937)
• Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (1942)
• The Golden Age of Greek Literature (1943)
• Spokesmen for God (1949)
• Witness to the Truth: Christ and His Interpreters (1949)
• Echo of Greece (1957)
• Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters, ed. by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series LXXI, Princeton University Press, 1961, fifth printing 1969

References

1. ^ ^{a b c d e f g} New York Times, Obituary, 1 June 1963
2. ^ ^{a b c d} Hamilton, Alice. Exploring the Dangerous Trades: the Autobiography of Alice Hamilton, M.D., Northeastern Univ. Press (1985)
3. ^ ^{a b c} Singer, Sandra L. Adventures Abroad: North American Women at German-speaking Universities, 1868-1915, Greenwood Publishing Group (2003)
4. ^ Hamilton, Edith. The Echo of Greece, W. W. Norton & Co. (1957)

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Edith Hamilton

• Edith Hamilton Papers. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

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