Bacon was one of a number of classicists employed by the Navy in this field of work, including her Bryn Mawr College professor, Richmond Lattimore.

[3] Following World War II, Bacon returned to graduate studies at Bryn Mawr College and completed her PhD in 1955 with a dissertation entitled "Barbarians in Greek Tragedy",[4] which was published by Yale University Press in 1961.

[1][6][2] While still untenured in 1960, Bacon organised support amongst Smith College faculty and wider academic community for two junior colleagues who had been reported and arrested for possessing homosexual pornography.

The events of the time were recounted in Barry Werth's The Scarlet Professor Newton Arvin: A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal (2001).

[1] During her summer vacations, Bacon taught classics in translation at the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College, and she was awarded an honorary doctorate there in 1970.

[3] With Pulitzer Prize poet Anthony Hecht, Bacon translated Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes, which was nominated for a National Book Award in 1973.

[9] In her presidential address to the American Philological Association in 1985, Bacon talked about her "lifelong preoccupation with the importance of the esthetic and literary features of Plato's work".