Unknown Latin Literature

Extract

One of the features of classical scholarship during the last ten years has been a renewal of interest in Latin literature. In England, at least, this was at a low ebb between the two great wars. The literature of Rome was regarded as derivative and second-rate. Virgil was the unwilling prisoner of the Augustan propaganda machine, Horace the favourite poet of those with no feeling for poetry, Ovid (apart from the Ars Amatoria) no more than a verse-writer of fatal facility, Plautus a knock-about comedian, and Terence a bore. Apart from Catullus, Lucretius, Petronius, and Tacitus, Latin could play no cards that Greek could not instantly trump. I do not think this an unfair picture of the impression of Latin literature I was given as an undergraduate. Why this was so is less easy to say. Partly, perhaps, because Oxford and Cambridge produced a succession of great expositors of Greek literature at a time when many of their Latin colleagues seemed immersed in the more arid forms of textual scholarship. Partly, again, because the iconoclasm of the age found in Latin a profitable and easy target.