Hamilton was, despite her German birth, very American. I grew up in the UK and had barely heard of her until a few years ago. Within the history of the popularization and democratization of classical studies in the US, Hamilton’s work has played an enormous part. Her books, especially Mythology, retain their hold on the American reading public, for several reasons. One is their fluent, vivid, and vigorous style, reminiscent of the most effective and inspirational kind of old-fashioned high school Latin teacher. The prose is very lightly archaic and vaguely biblical, which helps to establish the author’s claim to an authoritative knowledge of the world of antiquity and ancient legends: “But Jason withstood the fearful creatures as a great rock in the sea withstands the waves.” It is truly gripping stuff, especially suitable to reading out loud. Purely as a stylist, Hamilton deserves her continuing status in the bestseller ranks.
In much of her writing, Hamilton maintains a constant aura of authority on the page, not least by interweaving her summaries and discussions with little snippets of ancient texts, translated in a very loose, evocative style and with no source ever provided: The reader is encouraged to take them as a matter of faith, not research. The most famous such snippet, from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, was quoted by Senator Robert F. Kennedy, a great admirer of Hamilton, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” As the classicist Judith Hallett has noted in one of her numerous learned articles about Hamilton (only one of which Houseman cites), Kennedy was misquoting Hamilton from memory—and Hamilton’s translation was itself both slapdash and domesticizing, for instance in its rendition of the plural “gods” as the appropriately American “God.”
The second great reason for Hamilton’s grip on the American reading public is that she remakes ancient Greece in the image of an idealized United States—a world of glorious individualism and democratic freedom for all (or, if not exactly all, at least for everyone who matters). She relies heavily on vague, more or less unprovable grand claims about “spirit”: “To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful and delightful to live in,” she writes in one of many such passages, “was a mark of the Greek spirit which distinguished it from all that had gone before.” Hamilton created an image of ancient Greece that was alien enough to sound romantic, but also familiar to a readership of white Americans eager to imagine themselves as the proud inhabitants of a land of freedom and superiority.