Notes from Madeline Miller's Classroom

A portrait of a brilliant high school Latin teacher and theater director, before Circe and The Song of Achilles.

As for many young people who start down the path towards a Classics major, my story began with great teachers. Four years of the Oxford Latin Course, followed by Caesar and Cicero, had stoked my anticipation to read the Aeneid, the culmination of every high school Latin curriculum. Yet my journey from Troy through the underworld, like Aeneas’s own, took me to places wholly unexpected—thanks to the extraordinary guide whose passion for teaching went far beyond the page and the classroom.

During one study period, I asked my teacher about the thick stack of paper she was marking up. She explained that she was working on a rewrite of her novel—a first-person retelling of the Trojan war, as seen through the love between Achilles and Patroclus.

“Sounds like Iliad fanfic.” I was then a boundary-testing teenager and, admittedly, a bit of a jerk. “Eric, everything is Iliad fanfic”: she took the jab in stride, as she did every challenge that lies in wait for a first-time novelist.

Six years later, The Song of Achilles had won the Orange Prize (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction) and spent weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list—and now enjoys pride of place in the “by friends” section of my bookshelf.

The world now knows Madeline Miller as the author of two runaway bestsellers based on Greek myth. To her many grateful students—who know her as Emmy or, simply, Miller—she has been a mentor, a friend, and much more.

I first met Emmy not as a student, at least not in a formal sense, but as a green actor. By the time I was a freshman in high school, she and her colleague Jonah Cohen had bootstrapped a classical theater program, supported by their own funds and donations from parents, that was the envy of every Main Line prep school. Each fall, they put on a collection of scenes taken from various Shakespearean plays and woven into a cohesive piece, followed by a production of a full play in the spring. By the time I graduated, I’d been part of productions of Antony & Cleopatra, The Merry Wives of Windsor, the Henry VI trilogy, and King Lear—and dabbled with The Merchant of Venice, Richard III, Henry IV Part I, Much Ado About Nothing, and many more.

Students who had never thought of being involved in theater before gave their nights and weekends to readings and rehearsals. Free periods were best spent in Emmy’s classroom, diving into the details that made a character tick: we grappled together with Edmund’s nihilism, Richard’s self-loathing, and Falstaff’s inexplicable charisma. Our countless impromptu coachings connected my intellectual, personal, and creative selves in ways I’d never experienced before.

For many of the teens who came through Emmy and Jonah’s Shakespeare program, it was (forgive the flourish) life-changing. It was the first time many of these students found a creative pursuit at which they excelled, an expressive outlet they could share with their peers, a sense of community and even visibility usually reserved for varsity athletics: they made the theater kids feel impossibly cool.

Exceptional as she was as a teacher, Emmy modeled a relationship with literature that went far beyond the classroom. Her passion wasn’t bounded by her curriculum or her formal expertise: every corner of the literary world was an opportunity to learn, to explore, to play.

Now she demonstrates that passion not only to her students—she brings it to millions of readers who may have had little prior knowledge of classical Greek mythology, but who now have a window into a new cultural world. For those lucky enough to have enjoyed The Song of Achilles and Circe, ancient myth and culture surely seem less remote than before. Once the preserve of a handful of polyglots (we happy few!), these stories have been laid wide open in all their imaginative possibility to anyone who wants to access them.

A good student of the Classics has to be a proficient linguist, writer, and historian—but the best ones possess the soul of a poet, a dramatist, an actor, and a novelist, as well. The world is now discovering, as her friends and students have known for decades, that Madeline Miller is all that and much more: her deep love of the human experience in its many shades of expression, combined with an eagerness to share her passion with anyone willing to read, makes her a one-of-a-kind classicist.

The Paideia Institute & St. John's College are excited to present Conversations with the Classics, a free online lecture with Madeline Miller on Sunday, April 6th at 12:00pm ET. Visit the event page to learn more and RSVP.