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Eva Palmer Sikelianos, along with her husband, the poet Angehlos Sikelianos, founded the first modern Delphic Festival in 1927 in an effort to revive the ancient Greek rites that had taken place on that spot more than twenty-five hundred years before. This chapter explores Palmer Sikelianos’s choreography, rituals, music, and dramaturgy for her reconstructed Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus in light of her research on ancient Greek culture, conducted in both Paris and modern Greece. Based on silent film records of Palmer Sikelianos’s 1930 festival, her autobiography, her collaborations with Natalie Clifford Barney on Greek-themed theatricals in the early 1900s, and comparisons to the movement vocabulary and other contemporary stagings of ancient Greek festivals and sport, the chapter demonstrates how Palmer Sikelianos navigated between the needs and methods of the archaeologist and those of the performer. She blended the oldest sources on ancient Greek ritual music and dance that she could find with what she saw as an authentic “spirit” of Greek culture that she observed in modern Greek society. Her performances drew from archival/archaeological courses (ancient treatises, dance iconography) and lived practices (folk song, modern dance, Byzantine chant traditions). Like the Ballets Russes’s re-enactment of ancient Greece in Daphnis et Cholé and L’Après-midi d’un Fauné and pagan Rus’s in Le Sacre du printemps [The Rite of Spring], Palmer Sikelianos’s project to re-enact “authentic” Greek theater and choreography illustrates that theories of theatrical historical reconstruction in the early twentieth century were heavily influence by contemporary theatrical, political, and social events.

This chapter follows Eva Palmer Sikelianos's life to its end. From writing Upward Panic to exchanging weaving tips, to translating Angelos Sikelianos's work, to becoming a polylingual correspondent with hundreds of people as World War II gave way to the Cold War, Eva made writing the primary medium of her art of living. She found urgency in writing—a clarity of purpose that propelled her into the present in a new way—especially after she received a contraband package of Angelos's wartime resistance poems on the eve of the Greek civil war in 1944. The urgency of that critical moment thrust her into political action, turning her pen into a tool for anti-imperialist activism in a way that set up her brilliant last act.

This chapter explores Eva Palmer Sikelianos's fascinating shift from one stage to another as she left behind the fashion-conscious performance world of her Sapphic circle to try out a new role in Greek society. It does so by returning to Paris to observe her first attempts at weaving fabric for the Greek costumes of Equivoque. It retraces her entry into Greece, paying close attention to multiple levels of change: her attachment to Penelope, courtship with Angelos, decision to abandon Western dress, creation of new materials and techniques for dressing herself, performance of the role of wife and mother, and the gradual widening of her frame of interest and testing of nationalist ideologies. Eva's way into Greece was definitely her own; at the same time, it is representative of the way that certain Western women of Eva's era and class broached Greece differently from men.

This chapter tracks Eva Palmer Sikelianos's involvement with Sappho's poetry. To study how her reading of Sappho “implicated” or involved her in Sappho's poetic corpus on both a physical and literary level, it pays attention to Eva's hair, dress, and gestures; the photographs for which she posed; the letters she wrote; and the ways in which these different media delivered the pain and pleasure of Sappho's effects. For instance, signs of Eva's involvement with Sappho's poetry are subtly coded in an early twentieth-century photograph. It features Eva seated in a leather chair holding a book upright on her lap, and a wall of books appears in the background to her left. While the picture represents an upper-class white American woman reading in a Victorian home study, the Greek prototype is suggested by the hair.

This chapter tracks Eva Palmer Sikelianos's activities in a different performance medium, music. An organ named for her (Evion Panharmonium), records from a school of Byzantine music where she taught, two lectures, and more letters and photographs structure an inquiry into her collaboration with three subaltern musicians: Penelope Sikelianos, Konstantinos Psachos, and Khorshed Naoroji. Each one of these figures shaped Eva's journey in a different way, causing her to change the orientation of her musical pursuits from an initial disorienting pleasure that beguiled her (Penelope), to an essential part of the curriculum of becoming Greek (Psachos), to the basis of a social movement (Khorshed Naoroji) and ground for staging the Delphic Festivals.

This chapter pushes against the notion that Eva Palmer Sikelianos's work in Greece was disconnected from her non-Greek past and indifferent to “archaeological problems.” Digging deep into her papers and other sources dating between 1903 and 1940, the chapter pieces together Eva's dialogue with artists from Isadora Duncan to H. D. to George Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell to Angelos Sikelianos, who were all familiar with archaeological problems but standing at an oblique angle to them as they thought about how to stage the ancient Greek chorus. This transatlantic genealogy allows reflection on how creative work happening near ruins, yet outside the formal discipline of archaeology, responds to the place, takes on the feel of archaeological discoveries, and generates further rounds of imaginative reworking. The same genealogy brings into view how Eva's efforts to revive the tragic chorus, having transformed Isadora's experiments, traveled across the Atlantic to inform the work of Ted Shawn.

This chapter argues that Eva Palmer Sikelianos's encounter with Greece offers a sense of just how complex the cultural terrain can be. Hellenism operates on an assimilative model. It is constantly absorbing new snippets of memory from many different cultures as if they were original to its existence. The process can set off conflicts between groups that vie to infuse the Greek past with their culture of knowledge. Indeed cultural interchange, appropriation, and the dominance of one group over another are imprinted in the history of the idea of Hellenism. The complexity increases when people such as Eva—endowed with the power of Western institutions and invested in the transcendence of the Greek past—meet living Greeks in the crucible of Greece and become enamored of the new Greece that they discover.

This chapter excavates the remaining traces of pseudo-ancient Greek musical and dance performance that took place in Natalie Clifford Barney’s Parisian home in the first decades of the twentieth century. Barney’s discovery of Greek antiquity came about at the same time that she became aware of her own sexual identity. She perceived a freedom in the culture of ancient Lesbos and Athens that she felt was lacking in early twentieth-century American and French culture, and she used her passion for studying ancient Greek poetry under the tutelage of the best Greek scholars in Paris to channel both her creative and erotic interests in a very public way. This chapter focuses on the alterity of queer performance and reception within Barney’s Parisian circle by exploring how queer performance and identity were mapped in her cultural salon. The evidence of these performances remains in fragments, scattered across public and private collections, preserved in photographs, memoirs, letters, and anecdotes told third-hand. The chapter draws on theories of performance and queerness to make sense of the archival materials relating to re-enactment of ancient Greek dance and music hosted at the heiress’s home. This illustrates the role of ancient Greek–inspired music and dance in defining queer subjectivity in early twentieth-century Parisian salons. In piecing together fragments, this chapter offers new ways for musicologists to think about performance and the archive.

Edith Hamilton (1867–1963) reached a wide US reading public through such books on classical antiquity as The Greek Way (1930), The Roman Way (1932), Three Greek Plays (1937) and Mythology (1942). By re-imagining classical antiquity and its legacy for a general audience, Hamilton authorized Greco-Roman antiquity as a source of American intellectual prestige and artistic inspiration. But how well does the term ‘classical scholar’ apply to Hamilton, who served as headmistress of an all-female private college preparatory institution, the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore, for twenty-six years before beginning her literary career—and did not hold a doctoral degree, publish specialized research, or teach at the university level? My discussion addresses this question, along with the complications entailed in labelling Hamilton an American, educator or even a classicist.