When Helen Hayes asked Edith Hamilton to sign her copy of The Greek Way, Hamilton wrote, “To Helen Hayes, whose life is a search for excellence.” As Hayes recalled in her memoirs, My Life in Three Acts (1990), “That message had helped keep me on my toes for years.” That message could also describe Edith Hamilton herself.

Edith Hamilton published The Greek Way, her first book, in 1930, when she was 62 years old. It became a bestseller, chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club, and is still in print. At her publisher’s request, she then wrote The Roman Way, appearing in 1932. Ten years later, she published Mythology, her retelling of ancient Greek and Roman myths, as well as the old Norse myths. Left to herself, though, she would never have written a word.

Born in 1867 in Dresden when her parents were visiting Germany, Edith Hamilton grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Her grandfather, Allen Hamilton, had been one of the founders of that city and served as a Whig in the Indiana state senate. Edith was homeschooled, her father teaching her and her sisters Latin and Greek, and her mother taught them French and German.

Edith then attended Bryn Mawr College, a ladies’ college just east of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. There she studied Latin and Greek and earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree. With plans to pursue a doctorate, she attended lectures in the ancient classics at the University of Leipzig. Her German professors disappointed her, however, their lectures focusing on grammatical and philological points, exercises she found tedious.

Her alma mater had an all-girls preparatory school, the Bryn Mawr School, in Baltimore, Maryland, and in 1896 the school hired her as its headmistress. From then until her retirement in 1922 she ran the school and also taught there. During those years as an administrator and teacher, she never thought of writing for publication.

When she retired, her friends and former students urged her to write down what to them were her insightful and inspiring readings of ancient Greek and Latin texts. She found the idea absurd but at last gave in, writing six articles on ancient Greek drama for Theatre Arts Monthly. When later asked why she became an author, and so late in life, she quipped, “I was bullied into it!”

In 1942, she revised and expanded The Greek Way. Among the new material was a chapter on Xenophon. Often seen as a distant third among ancient Greek historians, much daylight between him and Herodotus and Thucydides, Xenophon nevertheless broke new ground with short prose works on various topics, making him the father of the historical essay.

With her characteristic clarity and brevity, Hamilton described a few of Xenophon’s shorter works. Like Plato, he had studied under Socrates, but unlike Plato, Xenophon’s accounts of Socrates are more descriptive. Both Plato and Xenophon wrote works called Symposium, but, as Hamilton put it, “The guests at Xenophon’s dinner, except for himself and Socrates, were ordinary people who would quickly have been bored by the speeches in the [that is, Plato’s] Symposium.” One could hardly blame them.

For therein remains Xenophon’s great appeal, speaking across the centuries to those of us who are happily dismissed as middle-brow. As Hamilton summed him up, Xenophon was “a man of good will and good sense, kindly, honest, pious; intelligent, too, interested in ideas, not the purely speculative kind, rather those that could be made to work toward some rational, practical good.” He wrote about hunting and dogs and how to keep up a country estate, and, although Hamilton did not mention it, he wrote a brief biography of his friend, Agesilaus II, King of Sparta. Xenophon sketched him as embodying the four cardinal virtues of courage, justice, self-control, and prudence. All in all, Xenophon comes across as good company; Hamilton called him “the ordinary Athenian gentleman.”

However, she also saw his limitations. “With two or three exceptions,” she wrote, his writings “are quite pedestrian; sensible, straightforward, clearly written, but no more.” Xenophon’s further recollections about Socrates, Memorabilia, inspired Zeno, founder of Stoicism, but Xenophon otherwise has left scant traces in the history of philosophy. Where he stands out is with an account of a military expedition.

Four hundred years before Christ, Xenophon signed on with ten thousand Greek mercenaries fighting on behalf of a claimant to the royal throne of Persia. After that venture failed, the ten thousand made an epic retreat. Xenophon’s history of that retreat, Anabasis, was translated in 1949 by Rex Warner for Penguin Books as The Persian Expedition, saving anyone the embarrassment of putting the accent on the third syllable of Anabasis instead of on the second.

For Hamilton, Xenophon’s Anabasis recalled American history of her grandfather’s day. “No less than our westward-faring pioneer ancestors who resembled them,” she wrote, “they understood the necessity of acting together.” She saw these strong-willed individuals working together as personifying the best of balanced self-government. “The Athenian was a law unto himself,” she explained, “but his dominant instinct to stand alone was counterbalanced by his sense of overwhelming obligation to serve the state.”

Her grandfather was a younger contemporary of Lewis and Clark, and their published Journals stand as a worthy literary descendant of Xenophon’s Anabasis. In each case, we find real men facing real dangers in real places. Moreover, the joy of Lewis and Clark first catching sight of the Pacific Ocean recalls that of Xenophon and his men as they reached the Black Sea. Their jubilant cry of Thalassa, Thalassa!, “The sea, the sea!,” rings down the ages.

In 1965, a distinguished Oxford don, Sir Maurice Bowra, cited The Greek Way in his illustrated history, Classical Greece. Two years earlier, the year Hamilton died, he had written an introduction to a new edition of The Greek Way. There he hailed that book as “the authentic utterance of one who lived so long in her imagination with the Greeks that she made them part of herself and formed an intimacy with them which few more strictly professional scholars could attain.”

Bowra admired Hamilton’s long immersion in the original Greek texts, knowing them “from the inside.” He noted that she “tempered this remarkable sympathy with a high degree of independence and detachment.” She could see where ancient Greeks fell short, but she also saw how they can still lead us all to excellence.