Edith Hamilton [Mis-]Reads Two Unusual Texts: Ps.-Xenophon’s Athenaion Politeia and a Delphic Honorific Inscription

Abstract

Edith Hamilton, America’s mid-century popularizer of classical Greek and Roman cultures, enjoyed a long career as a preparatory school Latin teacher and administrator before publishing her first book The Greek Way at age 62 in 1930 (2^nd expanded edition, 1942). The title embodies her reductionist view of what and who mattered. Disdaining scholarship and most scholars, she introduced pre- and post-World War II generations of Americans to a cele­bratory view of the Periclean age. Her appealingly (1942) retold tales in Mythology has always remained in print. Her admiration for the celebrity Sir Gilbert Murray, and possible acquaintance with him, encouraged her to depend on his Rise of the Greek Epic (1907/34⁴), especially in her titular essay for the posthumous collection The Ever Present Past (1958/64). There, praise of Athenian culture and “mind” produced mis-readings of Ps.-Xenophon’s crabby journalism, The Constitution of Athens, and a misunderstanding of an honorific inscription at Hellenistic Delphi. Her dedication to individualism, self-reliance, and certain democracies made her useful to the United States State Department in the Cold War. Robert Kennedy quoted her translation of Aeschylus’ Agamem­non with sincere passion. Her star qualities as a public intellectual representing Classics have yet to be replicated.