The Athenian

At the center of the stage of the ancient theater of Herodes Atticus at the foot of the Acropolis, a frail old lady stood one night last week nodding to the applause of cabinet ministers, diplomats and Athenian intellectuals. The mayor of Athens had just proclaimed Miss Edith Hamilton of Washington, D.C. an honorary citizen, and for an instant it seemed as if she might break down. Instead, Edith Hamilton, just four days short of 90, walked up to a microphone and in a firm voice declared: "I am an Athenian citizen! I am an Athenian citizen! This is the proudest moment in all my life."

The occasion for the tribute was a U.S.-inspired production of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, played partly in the Hamilton English translation and partly in modern Greek. Though the performance was a bit too complicated to arouse noisy enthusiasm, Edith Hamilton's appearance more than made the evening. Over the years she had done as much as any scholar to spread in so eloquent and popular a form the story of the ancient world among English-speaking readers, and last week the Greeks were determined to show their gratitude. In the name of the King, the Minister of Education decorated her with the Golden Cross of the Order of Benefaction. But in a sense, the honor of citizenship was a mere formality, for in spirit Edith Hamilton has always been an Athenian.

"You Can Become Learned." The daughter of Montgomery Hamilton, a scholarly man of leisure. Edith grew up in Fort Wayne, Ind. At seven she began studying Greek and Latin, was able to hold her sisters enthralled for hours with her tales out of Sir Walter Scott and her recitations of Keats and Shelley. By the time she graduated from Miss Porter's Finishing School for Young Ladies in Farmington, Conn., she knew exactly what she wanted to do. "My dear Edith." clucked Miss Porter, "you can become learned. But, my dear Edith, I don't think much of learning."

After getting a B.A. and an M.A. at Bryn Mawr, she set out for Germany with her sister Alice, who was later to become the first woman professor at Harvard Medical School. In those days the University of Munich was a famous classics center, and even though no woman had ever been admitted before. Edith was soon a familiar sight in Munich's classrooms, seated at her special place, isolated from the males, on the speaker's platform. In 1896, she was made headmistress of Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore. There, for 26 years, "Miss Edith" remained.

A Reconciling Power. It was not until after her retirement that her real career began. In 1930 her The Greek Way appeared, immediately caught the imagination of both scholars and general readers. It contained no musty footnotes, no pedant's bibliography. Edith Hamilton's raw material for her reconstruction of Athens was the literature of Greece itself. Whether describing the great homeward march of the Ten Thousand ("So. always cold and sometimes freezing, always hungry and sometimes starving, and always, always fighting, they held their own"), or the achievement of Aeschylus ("In a man of this heroic temper, a piercing insight into the awful truth of human anguish met supreme poetic power, and tragedy was brought into being"), or simply the Greek love of sport, she brought an entire civilization into clear and brilliant focus.

In time, other books followed, including The Roman Way and The Echo of Greece. But this month the Book-of-the-Month Club chose the 27-year-old Greek Way for its current selection. Thus thousands more readers will learn what Edith Hamilton has to teach about the city where "the great spiritual forces that war in men's minds flowed along together in peace; law and freedom, truth and religion, beauty and goodness, the objective and the subjective--there was a truce to their eternal warfare, and the result was the balance and clarity ... a reconciling power, something of calm and serenity, the world has yet to see again."

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