The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature by Gilbert Highet (review)

The Classical Tradition, first published in 1949 and reissued in 2015 (its third reissue in paperback), ranks as perhaps the most famous of all the books published by one of the twentieth century’s most respected classicists. It provides a sweeping, unprecedented examination of the Greek and Roman influences on Western literature from the fall of classical civilization through the middle of the twentieth century. Its author, Gilbert Highet (1906–1978), a remarkable teacher/scholar who taught at Columbia University for thirty-five years, published roughly one thousand items, including twenty-one books.¹

When Cyril Bailey, whom Highet regarded as his best teacher at Oxford, read The Classical Tradition, he wrote to Highet: “I can’t see how any one man can have done it … I wonder that you are alive” (January 4, 1950). One may well wonder where Highet found the time to write a book of this magnitude between his three-volume translation of Werner Jaeger’s Paideia: die Formung des griechischen Menschen (Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, Oxford 1939–1945) and The Art of Teaching (New York 1950). Classics reviewers of that day regarded Highet’s 1949 book as an important pioneering work, as a stimulating, crisply written, carefully organized, and copiously documented mine of information. The distinguished literary critic Edmund Wilson described this volume as “solidly built,” “solidly grounded,” and “continually stimulating,” a volume “animated by the Humanistic spirit.”² And now, in his four-page foreword, Harold Bloom, having reread this volume over sixty years after its original publication, declares that he finds it as admirable and as invaluable as ever.

By placing a twenty-four-page table of contents at the beginning of The Classical Tradition, Highet provided his readers with a comprehensive outline of his book, furnishing a thorough and detailed view of every chapter. This detailed outline, a virtual mini-guide to the volume, furnishes readers with Highet’s first attempt to pack lots of information into every page while making every word count—a technique one may also observe throughout the rest of the volume. The comprehensive table of contents became a standard feature of his later books, like Juvenal the Satirist (Oxford 1954), The Anatomy of Satire (Princeton 1962), and The Speeches in Vergil’s Aeneid (Princeton 1972). Although the 2015 reissue prints the table of contents on xv–xxxviii, this reissue refers to it (707) as being on xiii-xxxvi, a reference unavoidably reproduced via the scanning process. The 2015 reissue, scanned from the 1951 reprint of the 1949 edition (with corrections), does not exhibit the errors Highet caught in 1949 but does retain and even introduce several mistakes.³

With scrupulous attention to detail, The Classical Tradition traces the Greek and Roman influences on the literature of the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. As Highet recognized, the process of imitation had an ongoing but checkered history; no single book had ever furnished a complete description of the process or even an outline of it. Striving to fill that void, Highet used his powerful writing style and a humane form of scholarship to celebrate the strength and the endurance of classical literature down through the ages. The specialist and nonspecialist should continue to find Highet’s descriptions of the classical and modern authors educational and stimulating not only in the text but also in the endnotes. These endnotes, not merely bibliographical, show illuminating insight, such as the two-page note on the Latin language (558–59) and the three-page note about Vergil and Beowulf (563–65)—Vergil (not Virgil) being the spelling of the poet’s name Highet insisted on using to avoid what he regarded as a medieval misspelling (74 lines 9–12, 584 n.13).

Although The Classical Tradition may seem out of place in the context...