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In almost forty years at Bryn Mawr College, Richard Hamilton has been in every regard the colleague we all wish for. His distinguished record of scholarship in Greek literature and religion is enviable, while his engagement in the College and with his students has been generous, inspiring, effective. Many Hamilton students have their Ph.D.'s from other institutions, but they owe their fundamental training, orientation, and inspiration to him.

It is as a citizen of the classical profession in the United States that he has earned the APA's Distinguished Service Award. In the 1970s, Prof. Hamilton recognized that instructors in classical Greek faced a challenge when bringing their students past introductory Greek courses in Homer and Plato to other Greek authors. He prescribed a remedy, and made it a reality. Since their inception in 1980 the Bryn Mawr Commentaries have been valued pedagogical tools throughout the profession. Carefully selected and rigorously edited, the Commentaries offer the assurance of scholarly accuracy and pedagogical consistency. Some 70 scholars have contributed volumes to the series and at last count, 100 volumes were in print.

The Commentaries were originally envisaged as mimeographs, but by the time the first volumes were published, technology had marched forward to the happy world of "desktop publishing." That attention to the potential of technological pointed to the future not only of pedagogy but of scholarship.

In 1990 Professor Hamilton conceived the revolution in scholarship that would become the Bryn Mawr Classical Review. He saw a need for high quality and timely reviews, published soon after a book appeared in print. BMCR is now publishing more than 700 reviews a year (the seven thousandth review was published in late October of 2009). It has become a primary voice of classics book reviewing in the United States, now drawing books and reviewers from around the world. Its free –"open access" – subscription by e-mail and distribution by website has made BMCR a part of the everyday working life of classicists around the world.

In fomenting and realizing these two revolutions, in pedagogy and scholarship, Professor Richard Hamilton has brought together wide and inclusive groups of colleagues. Yet both revolutions were animated, from their first days to the present, by his unfailing energy, selflessness, patience, good judgment, scholarly acumen, and good cheer. Friends and colleagues know well that this citation falls far short of enumerating his virtues, but the classics profession as a whole recognizes that it owes him thanks and acclaim for important work, well done, work from which our profession has benefited enormously, and will continue to benefit for many years to come.