“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.” Chapter 1, The Greek Way
When we read Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way in high school, I didn’t grasp the significance. The dour high-school literature teacher (I’ll call him Mr. S) tried to impress upon youthful minds Hamilton’s importance, and, I think, the end of the world as we knew it.
If he were alive today (and perhaps he still lives on, the way Hamilton did), I’m sure Mr. S would nod in his saturnine way, lips pinched together, at my rediscovery of Hamilton. Perhaps he would have felt a certain satisfaction at my surprise that The Greek Way, Hamilton’s first book, was published when she was sixty-two years old.
Not only that, but the book received almost instant acclaim. Hamilton–and the melancholy Mr. S–believed that “the great thinkers of Athens were unsurpassed in their mastery of truth and enlightenment”. Mr. S also predicted the end of civilization so convincingly that I saw little need to become a writer or even worry about living.
But I digress. By the time our high-school literature class read The Greek Way and then Mythology, Hamilton had been dead only for a few years. She died at age ninety-five, after writing many other books (after the age of sixty-two!), among them The Roman Way (1932), Mythology (1942), and The Echo of Greece (1957).
According to wikipedia.org, “to date, at the high school–and university-level, Mythology remains the premier introductory text about its subject.” Chances are almost everyone’s introduction to Greek life and thought comes from Hamilton. Perhaps students even tweet about the book. I can see Mr. S’ eyes rolling at that concept.
I would tweet to everyone in that class: Take heart, Boomers. Hamilton first visited Greece at age ninety.