She is described as the classical scholar who "brought into clear and brilliant focus the Golden Age of Greek life and thought ... with Homeric power and simplicity in her style of writing".

Montgomery met Gertrude Pond, the daughter of a wealthy Wall Street broker and sugar importer, while living in Germany.

Edith's mother, Gertrude, who loved modern literature and spoke several languages, remained socially active in the community and had "wide cultural and intellectual interests.

[13] Edith was the oldest of five siblings that included three sisters (Alice (1869–1970), Margaret (1871–1969), and Norah (1873–1945)) and a brother (Arthur "Quint" (1886–1967)), all of whom were accomplished in their respective fields.

[17] Hamilton returned to Indiana in 1886 and began four years of preparation prior to her acceptance at Bryn Mawr College near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1891.

The cash award from Bryn Mawr provided funds to enable Edith and Alice, who had completed her medical degree at the University of Michigan in 1893, to pursue further studies in Germany for an academic year.

[13][19] Although Hamilton never completed her doctorate, she did become an "inspiring and respected head of the school"[23] and was revered as an outstanding teacher of the classics, along with being an effective and successful administrator.

[27] Hamilton, who believed in providing students with a "rigorous" curriculum, successfully transitioned the girls school from its "mediocre beginnings into one of the foremost preparatory institutions in the country.

[27][28][29] After retiring as an educator in 1922 and moving to New York City in 1924, Hamilton began a second career as an author of essays and best-selling books on ancient Greek and Roman civilizations.

[4] At the suggestion of Rosamund Gilder, editor of Theater Arts Monthly, Hamilton began by writing essays about Greek drama and comedies.

Several of her early articles were published in Theater Arts Monthly before she began writing the series of books on ancient Greek and Roman life for which she is most noted.

[1] According to her biographer, Barbara Sicherman, Hamilton's life was "ruled by a passionately nonconformist vision" that was also the source of her "strength and vitality" as well as her "appeal as public figure and author.

[30] Drawing from Greek, Roman, Hebrew, and early Christian writings, Hamilton put into words what ancient people were like by concentrating on what they wrote about their own lives.

[31] The successful book, which Hamilton wrote at the urging of Elling Annestad, an editor at W. W. Norton Company, made her a well-known author in the United States.

One book reviewer noted that the Greeks, which Hamilton considered the first Westerners, challenged Eastern ways that "remained the same throughout the ages, forever remote from all that is modern."

"[36] American historian Bruce Catton noted the prophets, whose "religion was an affair of the workaday world," and their messages that Hamilton described in her "excellent book" are still as relevant today.

"[38] John Mason Brown, American drama critic, praised Hamilton's The Greek Way, placing it at the top among modern-day written about ancient Greece," and Mythology as "incomparably superior to Thomas Bulfinch's work on the subject.

At the age of eighty-two she offered new perspectives on the New Testament in Witness to the Truth: Christ and His Interpreters (1948) and produced a sequel to The Greek Way, titled The Echo of Greece (1957).

[19] The sequel to her first book discusses the political ideas of such teachers and leaders as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, and Alexander the Great.

[31] Hamilton continued traveling and lecturing in her eighties, and wrote articles, reviews, and translations of Greek plays, including The Trojan Women, Prometheus Bound, and Agamemnon.

In Washington, Reid was in charge of the local offices of Loomis, Sayles and Company, an investment firm that had been her employer since 1929; Hamilton continued to write and frequently entertained friends, fellow writers, government representatives, and other dignitaries at her home.

Among the eminent and famous were Isak Dinesen, Robert Frost, Harvard classicist Werner Jaeger and labor leader John L.

[45] Hamilton considered the high point of her life to be a trip to Greece at age 90 in 1957,[46] where, in Athens, she saw her translation of Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound performed at the ancient Odeon theater of Herodes Atticus.

An article in Publishers Weekly described the event in Hamilton's honor: floodlights illuminated the Parthenon, the Temple of Zeus and, for the first time in history, the Stoa.

The same reviewer also credited the book with noting that modern concepts of play and sport were actually common activities to the Greeks, who engaged in exercise and athletic events, including games, races, and music, dancing, and wrestling competitions, among others.

"He carried his beaten, underlined and annotated copy around with him for years, reading sections aloud to audiences in a flat, unrhythmic voice with a mournful edge" and could recite from memory various passages of Aeschylus that Hamilton had translated.

She accomplishes this, according to one writer, by showing that "behind all great thought stands an individual mind, fired by passion and possessed of an eye that sees deeply into humanity.

[1] Hamilton's adopted son, Dorian, who had earned a degree in chemistry at Amherst College, died at West Lafayette, Indiana, in January 2008, aged 90.

[4] Robert F. Kennedy quoted from Hamilton's translated works, "in what is perhaps his most memorable speech",[1] during a campaign rally on April 4, 1968, in Indianapolis, Indiana, as the news of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. spread.

"[46] According to classicist Joseph Casazza, that line about "taming the savageness of man" was created by Hamilton herself and has no direct relation to a single ancient text.