AMERICAN CLASSICIST

Comprehensive biography of the noted classicist and mythologist, whose life contained multitudes—and whispered secrets.

Edith Hamilton (1867-1963) had two lifelong intellectual interests: the ancient Greek language, which was “a reflection, she felt, of the clarity of the ancient Greek mind,” and Christianity. She was politically conservative and anti-communist, though she was also committed to women’s suffrage, pacifism, antifascism, nuclear disarmament, civil rights, and the abolition of the death penalty. More than that, Hamilton was a lesbian at a time when homosexuality was punishable by imprisonment in some places. Even so, historian Houseman chronicles, Hamilton was able to live openly with her partner, many years younger than she and once a student at the school where she was headmistress. Moreover, in the conservative circles that surrounded her home in Washington, D.C., populated by the likes of Ohio Senator Robert Taft, a U.S. Army general, and numerous journalists and government functionaries, no one blinked an eye at her living arrangements. Houseman takes no prurient interest in the matter but instead treats it as an example of Hamilton’s principled determination to live life on her own terms. “In her private life and in her published writing,” writes the author, “she was a strong advocate of individual freedom. This position was widely accepted by her friends, who worried that the spread of communism would make the individual citizen insignificant and powerless.” That published writing was prolific, including books such as Mythology—a book complicated by the rise of the Nazis and their heavy borrowings from the Norse pantheon—and The Greek Way. A writer of popular scholarship, Hamilton found a vast audience, whom she rewarded by connecting ancient themes to modern concerns such as “the meaning of citizenship in a democratic society.” It’s telling that 60 years after Hamilton’s death, Mythology remains in print.

A long overdue life of the multifaceted, deeply learned writer and explorer of the past.