Other editions of book The Greek Way

One of the main functions of classical scholarship is to provide material by which our understanding of the Greeks may be strengthened and deepened. Among those who have attempted this task, Miss Edith Hamilton holds an honored place. Her book, The Greek Way, is 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. She wrote of them with the special understanding which comes from single-minded devotion and admiring affection. Her ideas were emphatically her own, and though she inevitable owed something to other scholars, everything that she said had her own imprint on it and rose from her unflagging concern for what the Greeks did and said and were. As the humanities learn more and more from scientific methods, so science begins to see that it cannot disregard the humanities or prosper without them. This is a lesson that the Greeks can still teach us. Miss Hamilton accomplished something in her account of how the Greeks did it for themselves. (from the introduction)

The aim of this work is not a history of events but an account of the achievement and spirit of Greece. "Five hundred years before Christ in a little town on the far western border of the settled and civilizaed world, a strange new power was at work. . . . Athens had entered upon her brief and magnificent flowering of genius which so molded the world of mind and of spirit that our mind and spirit today are different. . . . What was then produced of art and of thought has never been surpasses and very rarely equalled, and the stamp of it is upon all the art and all the thought of the Western world." A perennial favorite in many different editions, Edith Hamilton's best-selling The Greek Way captures the spirit and achievements of Greece in the fifth century B.C. A retired headmistress when she began her writing career in the 1930s, Hamilton immediately demonstrated a remarkable ability to bring the world of ancient Greece to life, introducing that world to the twentieth century. The New York Times called The Greek Way a "book of both cultural and critical importance."