Helen H. Bacon Papers

Helen Hazard Bacon (1919-2007), Classics scholar and teacher, was born in Berkeley, California and spent part of her childhood in Florence, Italy. After graduating from Bryn Mawr College in 1940 and pursuing graduate studies at UC Berkeley and Harvard (1940-42), she joined the U.S. Naval Reserve as a Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES). She served actively until 1946, reaching the rank of Full Lieutenant. Along with fellow classicists, she worked in Washington, DC in the Navy’s Communications Annex, where she was a cryptanalysist decoding Japanese radio communications.

After the service, she returned to Bryn Mawr to pursue her doctorate. She taught at Bryn Mawr and the Woman’s College of Greensboro, N.C. before she joined the Classics Department at Smith College in 1953 and completed her Ph.D. in 1955. She also traveled to Greece on a Fulbright fellowship and studied at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (1952-1953).

At Smith, she was promoted from Instructor to Associate Professor (1953-61) and served as Department Chair (1959-61). In 1960, Bacon organized Smith faculty and students on behalf of two colleagues who had been arrested and dismissed from the College on charges of possession of pornography. She managed to have the Board of Trustees reverse their decision and her colleagues received their back pay, but they were not rehired. The events are recorded in Barry Werth’s The Scarlet Professor Newton Arvin: A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal (2001). After the publication of the book, and fifty years after the original events, Bacon was presented the David Burres Award for Civil Liberties by the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts in an April 29, 2002 ceremony at the Smith College Archives.

In the fall 1961, Bacon arrived as a Visiting Associate Professor at Barnard College’s Greek and Latin department, where she would remain for the next thirty years. A few months into her first year, and with President McIntosh’s support, she presented a proposal to the Committee on Instruction to merge the department’s advanced course offerings with Columbia’s. She was named department chair for the following year and given “full equality” so she could teach undergraduate and graduate courses at Barnard and Columbia. During her tenure as department chair (1962-1974), Bacon was instrumental in securing Barnard’s sponsorship of the Center for Classical Studies in Rome, before the College had a standard policy on study abroad (1966). With the support from the Institute on East Central Europe, she added Modern Greek to her department (beginning in 1967-1968). She also joined the faculty of the Philosophy department at Columbia in 1976, and became Emeritus in 1991.

Helen Bacon wrote two books: Barbarians in Greek Tragedy (1961) and a translation and introduction of Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes, co-authored with Anthony Hecht (1973), which was nominated for a National Book Award. William Arrowsmith, the editor of the Oxford Greek Tragedy series, contracted her for a second translation on Euripides’ Suppliants with poet (and then Columbia faculty member) David Ignatow. In the summer of 1974, Bacon and Ignatow received a four-week fellowship at the Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY to begin the work on their collaboration.

Bacon published articles mainly on Aeschylus, Plato, Vergil and Apuleius, but also wrote on Robert Frost and Edith Hamilton. Over the summers she taught Classics in translation at the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College (1966, 1968, 1973 and 1975), where she received an honorary doctorate in 1970. She was also actively involved in the American Philological Association, serving in the position of Director (1976-1979); Vice-President (1983-1984) and in 1985, as its elected President, the ninth woman to do so in over 100 years of the organization.