Edith Hamilton

Edith Hamilton (Dresden, 1867 - Washington, 1963) was an American writer and classicist who, after a long career as an educator, became one of the most widely read interpreters of ancient Greece and Rome. She wrote in English for a general audience, and her books carried the classical world well beyond university seminars.

Born in Germany to American parents, she was taken back to Fort Wayne, Indiana, while still an infant. Her father taught her Latin from the age of seven and later introduced her to Greek. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1894 and studied in Leipzig and Munich, where she is usually described as one of the first women to enroll at the university. From 1896 to 1922 she ran the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore, a private school for girls, where she set a demanding curriculum and pushed for new ideas.

She began writing after she retired from teaching. Her first book, The Greek Way, appeared in 1930, when she was sixty-two, and it sold well from the start. The Roman Way, Mythology and The Echo of Greece followed. Her style is clear and lively rather than scholarly in tone. She tried to show the thought, literature and everyday life of these cultures as things that still speak to readers today.

Her legacy rests mainly on her popular books, written for readers with no specialist training. She received honours including the Golden Cross of the Order of the Redeemer of Greece, and in 1957 she was made an honorary citizen of Athens. She is remembered as a bridge between scholarship and the general public.