Edith Hamilton

From Philosopedia

Hamilton, Courtesy of the Bryn Mawr College Archives

Edith Hamilton (12 August 1867 - 1 May 1963)

While her mother was visiting relatives in Dresden, Germany, Hamilton was born. When seven, she moved with her parents to Fort Wayne, Indiana. According to the 1880 Indiana Census (Allen County, Ft. Wayne, ED 125, page 21) the family was as follows:

Mont Hamilton, age 37, wholesale grocer, born Indiana, father born Ireland, mother born KY.

Gertrude (Pond) Hamilton, wife, age 35, born NY, father born VT, mother born NY.

Edith Hamilton, dau, age 13, born Germany, father born Indiana, mother born NY

Allice Hamilton, dau, age 11, born NY

Margareth, dau, age 9, born Indiana.

Norah, dau, age 7, born Indiana. [Arthur Hamilton, another son, was born in Indiana in March 1886.]

Four servants are also living with this family.

Her father, Montgomery Hamilton the grocer, taught her Latin and Greek when she was eight. Her mother taught her French. The family's servants taught her German.

She was educated at Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut, remarking later that "We weren't taught anything," explaining that, since all courses were elective, a young woman did not have to take any she was weak in or did not like.

She received her M.A. in 1894 from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. While there, 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. She and her sister, Alice, then became the first female students accepted at the universities of Leipzig and Munich.

In 1896, Hamilton became the headmistress of Bryn Mawr School for Girls in Baltimore, Maryland, where she infused the academic program with the humanistic and classical ideas for which she became well known, remaining there until retiring in 1922. According to the school, the students found her "a venerated presence - remote, terrifying, and incredibly demanding," adding that after her retirement she admitted that she never liked the work.

Although she had never before traveled to Greece, in 1930 she wrote the highly popular The Greek Way, following it with The Roman Way. Scholars complained about her translation and interpretation of the Greek originals, to which she admitted she did not claim to be a scholar, that her commitment was to the unverifiable "truths of the spirit" that she had found in what the ancient writers had described.

Contents 1 Humanism 2 Becoming an Athenian 3 Doris, the Companion 4 Works 5 Hamilton's Humanism

Humanism

Hamilton's humanistic views are often quoted:

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.

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.

Civilization . . . is a matter of imponderables, of delight in the thins of the mind, of love of beauty, of honor, grace, courtesy, delicate feeling. Where imponderables, are things of first importance, there is the height of civilization, and, if at the same time, the power of art exists unimpaired, human life has reached a level seldom attained and very seldom surpassed.

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

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.

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

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

Becoming an Athenian

In 1957, however, the year she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she went to Greece, was made an honorary citizen of Athens when she was 90, and was able to stand in the theater of Herodes Atticus, about which she had written. Time (19 August 1957) described the scene and provided biographical material:

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.

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.

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."

Doris, the Companion

When Hamilton left Maryland in the 1920s, she then moved to New York City to write about Greek Drama. Accompanying her was a former student, Doris Fielding Reid (born September 1895), now her life partner. According to Jeffery Johnson, the two now lived openly as lesbians, Hamilton "staying home to keep house" and write, and Reid continuing her work as an investment banker. The couple bought a summer home on Mount Desert Island.

Reid is mentioned in a 7 April 1954 edition of the Washington Post:

EDITH GITTINGS REID. Edith Gittings Reid, 92, a writer and friend of Woodrow Wilson, died Monday at the home of her daughter, Doris Fielding Reid, 2448 Massachusetts Ave, NW. Mrs. Reid, a native of Baltimore, had lived in Washington 10 years. She wrote books on President Wilson, Dr. William Osler, and William Sidney Thayer. Her husband, the last Harry Fielding Reid, was a professor of physics at Johns Hopkins University. Surviving, besides her daughter, is a son, Francis Fielding Reid, of Fort Lauderdale, FL. Funeral services will be held at Emanuel Church Chapel, Baltimore, at 3pm today.

The address on Massachusetts was also the home of Edith Hamilton.

A 2 June 1957 article in the Washington Post stated that Edith Hamilton had retired in 1922 after serving a 16-year tenure as the headmistress of Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore and that Miss Doris Fielding Reid was a former pupil of her at Bryn Mawr, was head of the Washington office of Loomis, Sayles & Co. investment firm, and was living at the Massachusetts Avenue address with Hamilton.

Reid wrote Edith Hamilton: An Intimate Portrait (1967), in which Alice Hamilton says of her sister, "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."

Works

The Greek Way (1930, nonfiction)

The Roman Way (1932, nonfiction)

The Prophets of Israel (1936, nonfiction)

Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (1942, nonfiction)

The Great Age of Greek Literature (1943, nonfiction)

Witness to the Truth: Christ and His Interpreters (1949, nonfiction)

Spokesmen for God (1949, nonfiction)

Echo of Greece (1957, nonfiction)

Hamilton's Humanism

Warren Allen Smith wrote to Hamilton in the 1950s and again in the 1960s, asking for her comments about his descriptions of "seven humanisms." Although maybe she might not be eager to be labeled, he asked if she had comments about any of the following: humanism; ancient humanism; theistic humanism; atheistic humanism; communistic humanism; and naturalistic (or scientific) humanism. To his disappointment and although he wrote a second time, she did not reply.

Smith in 2007 has commented about his interest in Hamilton:

In my first teaching job, I headed the English department of Bentley School, a private progressive school on West 86th Street in New York City, where I found no curriculum guides. So I commenced by reserving 9th grade for emphasizing the developing of reading/writing/speaking skills; 10th grade for humanities and world literature; 11th grade for American literature; and 12th grade for English literature. The big difference when compared with other schools was the inclusion of the humanities (art and music and architecture in addition to literature). Teenagers were assigned Edith Hamilton's books, supplemented during 2-hour class periods, with trips to the nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art on East 83rd Street, just across Central Park. After five years, when I became chairman of the English department at New Canaan, Connecticut, High School, I instituted the same emphasis, during which humanities classes scheduled train or bus trips to the Roman and Greek sections of the museum, where Ionian/Doric/Corinthian, sculpture, clothing styles, and archaeological finds were combined with papers about syntax, asyndeton, orthography, and what English classes were expected to cover.

I had really hoped to hear from Hamilton (my other disappointments being not having heard from two Alberts, Camus and Einstein). I expected Hamilton to say that, yes, she was a humanist, one interested in the humanities. I anticipated that she would distinguish between being an ancient humanist and being interested in ancient humanism. I thought she would find "classical humanism" a good label, with qualifications she would add. My interest was in whether she was theistic, atheistic, or naturalistic in her philosophy.

I have found no records that show Hamilton was a member of any of the organized religious denominations. After her commercial successes with the Greek and Roman books, 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), like a freethinker she praised certain of the Old Testament's moral insights but wrote of Jesus as being an unconventional searcher for truth, not as God who had come down in a human form. Christians, Hamilton described, were antagonistic to ideas not specifically contained in their dogmas and creeds. So why was an exception made in the case of Socrates? She suggested they recognized his likeness to their Christ. Her distinguishing between the Christ and Jesus could suggest she was unitarian or Unitarian, but by not hearing specifically it was necessary to continue finding if she went on record elsewhere.

Reid's services were held on 15 January 1973 at St. James Church Chapel, Madison Avenue at 71st Street in New York City. "Please omit flowers. Contributions to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society appreciated." That the service was not held elsewhere could be an indication that she, and perhaps Hamilton who had died in the neighborhood ten years prior, felt at home in that denomination.

Jesus, she wrote, was an example of a person who could be Christlike not through grace, but by nature. Erasmus had said, “Holy Socrates, pray for us.” To know him is a help to knowing Christ, and it is not hard to know him. We can see him quite clearly. Plato who drew his portrait, could not, of course, keep himself out of it, any more than Christ’s recorders could, but at least magic did not dog Plato’s footsteps as it did everyone’s footsteps when the Gospels were written. In the fourth century B.C. Greeks had no leaning to marvels. Also in the centuries that followed no one founded a church on Socrates and built up around him a theology and hung creeds and ceremonials upon him. To see what he was, according to The Rediscovery of Christ, we do not have to brush anything away except a bit of Plato. We can use him as a stepping stone to Christ, a first aid in realizing what Christ was. Such a sentiment, I found, is heard among contemporary Unitarians who are discreet in not calling themselves Christians. But nowhere is it found that Hamilton was or was not an agnostic, an atheist, or a naturalistic humanist.

During the period from 1948 to 1963, I also had a lifetime partner - hers was for 60 years, mine for 40. I am speculating that, like me, she was "closeted" during her teaching years. It was an era during which psychiatrists had pegged homosexuality as being abnormal. Because Edith and Doris were not churchgoers or church members - Denis Diderot declared that "Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd, and bloody religion that has ever infected the world," and I am guessing Edith and Doris would have agreed. My bet is that Hamilton would be most comfortable with the label of "humanistic naturalist," the same term used by non-Christians John Dewey, Kenneth Patton, and James Gutman.