Roman Triumphs New Books about Ancient Poetry

Why is it that, although we have been saying goodbye to Mr. Chips for ages now, he never actually seems to leave? The end has been nigh for Horace, Virgil, Ovid, and the lot since the First World War, yet fresh new translations and pioneering studies of Latin literature continue to appear in the twentyfirst century. The eminent classicist and public intellectual Mary Beard wondered aloud about this very paradox in an address given at the New York Public Library in December 2011 entitled “Do Classics Have a Future?” As she noted, “The sense of imminent loss, the perennial fear that we might just be on the verge of losing Classics entirely, is one very important thing that gives them—whether in professional study or creative re-engagement—the energy and edginess that I think they still have.” Certainly the past few years have borne out this insight—Stephen Greenblatt’s study of Lucretius, The Swerve, won both a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for non-fiction while Stacy Schiff’s best-selling biography of Cleopatra was listed on New York Times’s top ten books for 2010. In the meantime Rick Riordan’s young adult series, Percy Jackson & The Olympians, has not only re-energized interest in classical mythology among schoolchildren but also netted hundreds of millions of dollars in book and movie sales. If this is not a golden age of interest in Greece and Rome, it is certainly a gilded one.

Roman poetry has been especially favored in recent years by astute critics willing to offer original and inventive approaches to the field in an age when knowledge of the classical languages is decidedly on the wane. Among the most interesting new books along these lines is William Fitzgerald’s How to Read a Latin Poem If You Can’t Read Latin Yet, published by Oxford. “When we read Latin poetry,” he notes in the introduction, “we are coming as close to the texture of the Roman experience as we are when we walk down the streets of Pompeii, because poetry displays the pleasures the Romans took in their language, and the experiences it made possible for them.” In some ways I am not the right audience for this book, since I already know Latin and in fact have been teaching it for decades. But the readings of Roman poetry offered here by Fitzgerald—now at King’s College London but long associated with Berkeley—are sensitive and sensible, well worth the time of anybody with a serious interest in the literature of ancient Rome, regardless of his or her proficiency in Latin.

Fitzgerald is aware of how off-puttingly fusty the study of Roman literature can be, and he’s worked hard to avoid pedantry—I note that the phrase ablative absolute occurs only once in the book—concentrating on the sound and rhythm of the poetry itself. A good instance of this is his handling of Horace, who at the hands of his most dedicated English construers has come down to us as tedious and smug—Kiplingesque without the Kipling. “Huxtable’s Sidelights on Horace may possibly recall my name to your memories,” says a pompous old schoolmaster in introducing himself to Sherlock Holmes, who ignores the prompting. Among many other fine treatments Fitzgerald pays particular attention to the justly famous Pyrrha ode (book 1, poem 5), a poem that has never lacked for translation; over...