awarded Bacon the David Burres Award in a ceremony at the Smith College Archives on April 29, 2002, stating that Bacon was amongst those:heroes who speak out for civil liberties when it counts most—at the moment when individual rights are violated. Bacon spent the rest of her career at Barnard College, where she taught classics from 1961 to her retirement in 1989. She had permanent impact on the department when as chair Bacon made modern Greek a permanent part of the curriculum and started the tradition of the annual Barnard College Greek or Latin play. During this time, Bacon was a director of the American Philological Association (1976–79) and became president in 1985, the third woman elected as president. Bacon taught graduate courses regularly at Columbia University and was a visiting professor at Harvard University and Hampshire College. During her summer vacations, Bacon taught classics in translation at the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College, and she was awarded an honorary doctorate there in 1970. With Pulitzer Prize poet Anthony Hecht, Bacon translated Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes, which was nominated for a National Book Award in 1973. During her retirement, Bacon was a trustee of Meekins Library in Williamsburg from 1996 to 2001. Work In her presidential address to the American Philological Association in 1985, Bacon talked about her "lifelong preoccupation with the importance of the esthetic and literary features of Plato's work". The content summary note for the Helen H. Bacon Papers, held at the library of Barnard College, describes her work as focusing on Aeschylus, Plato, Vergil, and Apuleius and the comic novel on the classical side, but including work on Robert Frost and Edith Hamilton which is more properly categorized as classical reception studies. An obituary in scholarly journal The Classical World, written by Nancy Felson, Deborah Roberts, and Laura Slatkin described her as "well ahead of her time", a "pioneer", and "anticipat[ing] subsequent directions in the field", on account of Bacon's engagement with literary theory and psychoanalytic theory. Selected publications “Mortal Father, Divine Mother: Aeneid IV and VIII,” in Poets and Critics Read Vergil, ed. Sarah Spence (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001) pp. 76–85 “The Poetry of Phaedo,” in Cabinet of the Muses: Essays on Classical and Comparative Literature in Honor of Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, ed. Mark Griffith & Donald J. Mastronarde (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1990) pp. 147–162 “Aeschylus and Early Tragedy,” in