author
Helen McClees
b. 1885
An early 20th-century classical scholar, she wrote clear, accessible books that opened everyday life in ancient Greece and Rome to general readers. Her work also explored what inscriptions can reveal about the lives of women in ancient Athens.
1 Audiobook
The daily life of the Greeks and Romans as illustrated in the classical collections
by Helen McClees, N.Y.) Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York
About the author
Helen McClees was an American writer and scholar of the ancient world, listed in library records as born in 1885. Her best-known books include A Study of Women in Attic Inscriptions (1920) and The Daily Life of the Greeks and Romans as Illustrated in the Classical Collections, a Metropolitan Museum of Art publication that appeared in editions from 1924, 1933, and 1941.
Her writing focused on making classical history concrete and human. In The Daily Life of the Greeks and Romans, she used objects in museum collections to show how people in antiquity lived, worked, worshiped, and entertained themselves, giving readers a practical window into the ancient Mediterranean world.
Very little biographical information about her seems to be widely available online beyond catalog and library records. Even so, the books themselves show a scholar interested in everyday experience, especially the evidence that art, artifacts, and inscriptions preserve about ordinary lives.