American Classicist: The Life and Loves of Edith Hamilton by Victoria Houseman

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023
489 pp., $39.95

It’s been almost a century since Edith Hamilton published her classic The Greek Way, and during those years, countless thousands of readers have encountered Greek culture for the first time through her works—which include Mythology, The Echo of Greece, and translations of Plato, Euripides, and others. During her lifetime, in fact, she became so celebrated that the Greek government gave her its highest civilian award and made her an honorary Athenian citizen. Robert F. Kennedy was such a devotee that he quoted her in several speeches; his gravestone even features one of her translations of Aeschylus. Yet despite her achievements, Hamilton has never been the subject of a full biography until now.

Part of the reason is that many of her papers were lost in two floods that damaged her home in the 1930s. When, after her death, her publishers released a brief biographical sketch written by longtime companion Doris Fielding Reid, they prefaced it with a note explaining that those losses meant that “no conventional biography of this great lady . . . could be written.”¹ But with American Classicist, Victoria Houseman has undertaken what might aptly be called the herculean task of assembling the story of Hamilton’s life—from her birth in Germany in 1867 to her retirement and literary eminence in Washington, D.C., during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years—from those records that do survive.

That scholarship is a remarkable achievement. Unfortunately, however, Houseman does a poor job shaping the fruits of her research into an appealing narrative. American Classicist focuses overwhelmingly on Hamilton’s domestic life—which might have been understandable if she had been an adventurer or political figure outside the pages of her books, but the opposite is true: Beyond her writing, Hamilton’s life was mundane. It was in her writing and thinking that she shone; yet in a book approaching five hundred pages, Houseman omits almost entirely any discussion of her ideas or any comparison of her work with that of her contemporaries.

To summarize briefly, Hamilton was the oldest of four daughters born to a moderately prosperous family of bankers and grocers; was homeschooled before matriculating at Bryn Mawr College, where she majored in ancient languages; then she quit graduate studies to take a job running the girls’ school that Bryn Mawr operated in Baltimore. She kept that job for more than a quarter century before retiring at the age of fifty-four and starting her writing career. She never married but had close relationships with several women, particularly Doris Reid, a former student almost thirty years her junior. They lived together in New York, Maine, and D.C., for three decades, and Houseman draws the obvious conclusion that they were lovers, but she admits that she found no definitive evidence of this. In fact, it appears equally likely that they were what an older generation called “spinsters”—women without interest in romantic affairs of any kind.

But the true drama of Hamilton’s story is to be found in her work as a cultural scholar, translator, and literary critic. Beginning with The Greek Way in 1930, followed by The Roman Way in 1932, and books on ancient Hebrew and Christian prophets, Hamilton published ten volumes on history, literature, and philosophy, including a now-classic collection of Plato’s complete dialogues.

Her writing is notable for its unusually clear style and her focus on reason and other life-affirming values. These virtues strike one instantly upon opening The Greek Way, which starts with a bold argument that Greek civilization was not an ancient civilization at all, because

that which distinguishes the modern world from the ancient, and that which divides the West from the East, is the supremacy of mind in the affairs of men, and this came to birth in Greece and lived in Greece alone of all the ancient world. The Greeks were the first intellectualists. In a world where the irrational had played the chief role, they came forward as the protagonists of the mind.²

To the Egyptians, Hamilton argued, “the center of interest was the dead”; theirs was a despotism ruled by an all-powerful priestly class who taught that “the enduring world of reality was not the one [a person] walked in along the paths of everyday life but the one he should presently go to by the way of death.”³ Given that mysticism, it’s little wonder that for the Egyptians—and their cultural heirs today—“human suffering and death . . . was never conceived of as a cost in anything of value” and that their civilization stands as an eternal monument to monkishness and tyranny.⁴ The Greeks, by contrast, “rejoiced and turned full-face to life”—creating culture, art, and philosophy fundamentally oriented toward what we now call secular values.⁵ “To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful and delightful to live in, was a mark of the Greek spirit which distinguished it from all that had gone before.”⁶

Hamilton drew this distinction—reason versus mysticism, modern versus ancient, life versus death—throughout her examination of Greek culture. In her view, even tragedy (a Greek invention) was fundamentally life-affirming, because a well-written tragedy depicts a protagonist with exalted virtues brought low in a way that leaves the audience with “the poignant joy of heroism” and a “pain changed into, or let us say, charged with, exaltation.”⁷ And she turned this argument in unusual and thought-provoking directions, notably in the contrast she drew between what she called “classicism” and “romanticism” in art. She used these terms idiosyncratically: By classicism (which she considered characteristically Greek) she meant art that finds beauty in the unadorned facts of life, whereas by romanticism (which she associated with Roman civilization) she meant the “love of the strange” or the effort to “banish the drabness and monotony of every-day life with a sense of possible excitements and adventures.”⁸

She illustrated her argument by comparing the Greek poet Pindar and the Roman poet Virgil, each describing a volcano: Pindar wrote of “red flame[s] whirl[ing] the rocks with a roar far down to the sea [and sending] high aloft . . . fearful fountains of fire,” whereas Virgil wrote of “balls of flame that lick the stars and . . . the torn entrails of the mountains . . . hurled groaning to heaven.” ⁹ Pindar “was using his eyes,” she concluded—allowing the awesome reality to speak for itself—whereas Virgil was using “his imagination”—that is, gilding the lily.¹⁰

She found romanticism in this sense vaguely suspicious. Building on an argument Francis Bacon offered in The Advancement of Learning (1605), she contended that whereas Virgil’s poetry may have been elevated and profound, romanticism’s prioritization of the imaginary over the actual risked luring a culture away from reason and, consequently, from the values of life in this world. Bacon had differentiated between poetry that was “tied to the laws of matter” (Hamilton’s classicism) and poetry that was “feigned history” and “give[s] some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man wherein the nature of things doth deny it” (her romanticism).¹¹ Hamilton thought the latter could operate as a drug, causing the mind to “transcend the narrow limits of experience and move on unhampered by it to what the eye hath not seen nor ear heard.”¹² And she suspected that this had happened during the Dark Ages, when religious leaders found romantic language helpful in their “intellectualizing effort of dogmatic theology . . . with its absolute conviction of ‘a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness than can be found in the nature of things.’”¹³

Hamilton also thought a similar phenomenon could be seen in modern times: Rather than exaggerating the beauty of the world, as Virgil did, modern writers tended to exaggerate its defects. Yet the overall process was the same: drawing people away from what she called “the beauty and the meaning in [the] fundamentals of human life” and toward things that were labeled modern but were just the same old mysticism.¹⁴

In a scathing 1952 review of William Faulkner’s novels, for example, she argued that although Faulkner was celebrated for his naturalism, he was really America’s “leading romanticist”—in a dismal, even horrifying way.¹⁵ Faulkner “detests nature” and life itself, she wrote. “[His] novels are about ugly people in an ugly land. There is no beauty anywhere.”¹⁶ His writing, therefore, represented not modernity but a regression to a “violently twisted Puritan[ism].”¹⁷ The foundation of “the extremely bleak view he takes of all things” was “the conviction, older than Puritanism, as old as antiquity, present in all ages, among all nations and races, that there is an inseparable trinity: the world and all that is therein, the flesh and all that are born therefrom, and the devil.”¹⁸ What’s more, a culture that applauded such nihilism was endangering its own survival:

These are ideas which have in many periods darkened the world. Children brought up in their shadow will not be apt to see the things that are lovely or many things that are good. In such an atmosphere beauty and enjoyment are suspect, and sex of course is still worse.¹⁹

When it came to applying her secular humanist worldview to religion, Hamilton was less successful. She considered herself a Christian but abandoned traditional doctrine in her college years in favor of what Houseman describes as a belief that “the divine presence in each individual was manifested through reason” (61). Thus, in her two books about the Bible, The Prophets of Israel (1936) and Witness to the Truth (1948), she poured scorn on dogma and mysticism, condemning the church for preaching “during almost all the life of Christianity” that “religion’s chief function was to tell people what to think” and that “wholesale subscription to whatever the church declared to be true was the one thing needful.”²⁰ Yet when it came to identifying her own beliefs, she retreated into vague efforts to redefine the word “faith” as something like personal commitment, or “a driving power . . . to run the race.”²¹

Hamilton’s interpretations of ancient culture and modern literature are certainly subject to debate—and were debated, both during her life and since. She has proven notably unpopular among academics, who regard her as a “popularizer” at best. Scholarly translators have accorded her only grudging respect, and classics professors have complained that her work relies on “arbitrary selections of evidence” and “unsubstantiated personal and anachronistic interpretations of ancient texts.”²² These objections have some merit. Her claim that the ancient Greeks “rejoiced in life,” for example, is hard to square with Sophocles’s famous assertion that life is so full of suffering that it would be better “not to be born”—and that “second best” would be “to have seen the light / and then to go back quickly whence we came.”²³ And her conviction that “love of reason . . . distinguished the Greek way” is difficult to reconcile with Socrates’s statement that “our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness,” let alone with the intense, even savage irrationality of the Greek mystery cults, such as that of Dionysus, god of anarchy and intoxication. ²⁴

Houseman, however, makes no effort to address these debates—and that’s a shame, because Hamilton’s work deserves a defense. Notwithstanding the objections of specialists, her broader perspectives on the Greco-Roman legacy and the writings of ancient and modern thinkers do capture essential truths that have never been more relevant than today. Every culture has included ugly elements—irrationality, oppression, poverty—but what makes the Greek Golden Age stand out are its finest achievements and most essential qualities. What made the Greeks unique, and the fountainhead of so much intellectual accomplishment, were precisely those features that Hamilton praised, particularly their adherence—imperfect as it may have been—to a philosophy grounded in this world rather than the next.

In his underappreciated book Grand Theories and Everyday Beliefs, the philosopher Wallace Matson observed that it was “the amazing characteristic of the Ionian Greeks to have been first and greatest not only in epic poetry but in a multitude of other fields: history (Herodotus), lyric poetry (Sappho), logic, biology, literary criticism, ethics (all Aristotle), and—above all, for it absolutely changed the world—science: Thales’ invention.”²⁵ The essential element of that invention, he maintained, was expressed in Thales’s curious phrase, “all things are full of gods.” What Thales meant was that the natural world is all there is—there’s no alternate reality we can access by some means other than reason—and that all features of the natural world can, in principle, be explained by comprehending their natures and causality. That insight truly did break with everything that had gone before, spectacularly so. Other cultures remained—and many still remain—stuck in the superstitious belief that appeasing the gods can change reality. But Thales’s insight represented the first opening of the doorway through which humanity could escape the cycle of ignorance and despotism. And that does make them recognizably “modern,” as Hamilton claimed, at least to anyone who defines that word in terms of reason and human flourishing.

After Hamilton’s death in 1963 at the age of ninety-six, the author of one obituary, while admitting that Hamilton “idealized” the ancient Greeks, remarked that it was never her intent to offer a dispassionate scholarly analysis of all the complexities of their civilization. Instead, “her search was for what was best in them . . . their calm, their reason, their realism, their pure sense of perfection, their genius for brevity, their concern with the imponderables, their Doric simplicity.”²⁶ These were qualities she shared and sought to inspire in readers. Yet although she succeeded brilliantly in that effort, her legacy still awaits a writer who will vindicate her reputation as a champion of humanity’s “first intellectualists.”

About Timothy Sandefur

Timothy Sandefur is vice president for legal affairs at the Goldwater Institute and is a contributing editor of The Objective Standard.

View all articles by Timothy Sandefur →