From the earliest fragments to the endof the Vth Century a.d.
Oxford
At the Clarendon Press
FIRST PUBLISHED 1912
REPRINTED 1921, 1926, 1934, 1940
1943, 1947, 1952, 1964, 1968
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
Preface
Passages
Translations and Imitations
Note upon the Saturnian metre
Glossary of old latin
Index of Authors and Passages
Index of First Lines
Footnotes
The plan of this book excludes epic and the drama,and in general so much of Roman poetry as couldbe included only by a licence of excerpt mostlydangerous and in poetry of any architectonic pretensionsintolerable. If any one remarks as inconsistent with thisplan the inclusion of the more considerable fragments ofEnnius and the early tragedians, I will only say that I havenot thought it worth while to be wiser here than Time andFate, which have of their own act given us these poets inlamentable excerpt. A more real inconsistency may befound in my treatment of the didactic poets. It seemeda pity that Didactic Poetry—in some ways the mostcharacteristic product of the Roman genius—should, insuch a Collection as this, be wholly unrepresented. Itseemed a pity: and it seemed also on the whole unnecessary.It seemed unnecessary, for the reason thatmany of the great passages of Lucretius, Vergil, andManilius hang so loosely to their contexts that the poetsthemselves seem to invite the gentle violence of the excerptor.These passages are 'golden branches' set in analien stock—non sua seminat arbos. The hand that wouldvipluck them must be at once courageous and circumspect.But they attend the fated despoiler:
Even outside Didactic Poetry I have allowed myself anoccasional disloyalty to my own rule against excerpts. Ihave, for example, detached one or two lyrics from theTragedies of Seneca. And, again, from the long andsometimes tedious Itinerarium of Rutilius I have detachedthe splendid apostrophe to Rome which stands in theforefront of that poem. These are pieces without whichno anthology of Latin poetry would be anything butgrotesquely incomplete. And after all we should be themasters and not the slaves of our own rules.
Satire finds no place in this book. Horace is representedonly by his lyrics. Juvenal and Persius are notrepresented at all. The Satires and Epistles of Horace arebooks of deep and wide influence. They have taughtlessons in school which have been remembered in the world.They have made an appeal to natures which teaching moreprofound and spiritual leaves untouched. By their largetemper and by their complete freedom from cant they haveachieved a place in the regard of men from which they arenot likely to be dis