A very pleasant read, with much unintended comedy. First the good: Highet writes well, and gives you just enough information so that you want to read more of, or just read, the poets he discusses here: Catullus, Virgil, Propertius, Horace, Tibullus, Ovid, and Juvenal. He also makes me want to go back to Rome. His biographies of the poets are charming, in the patrician, pre-criticism manner; his discussions of the poetry are intriguing, particularly when he focuses closely (as in the Horace chapter); and even the landscape writing, which generally bores me silly, had just enough people in it for me to care. He even has the occasional, pithy, perfect phrase, as when he suggests that reading Tibullus is like "watching Thomas Gray trying to write Baudelaire's 'Flowers of Evil.'" As that phrase suggests, Highet's learning is *broad*, and he puts it to good use.

The unintended comedy just comes from reading a book written as popularization of Latin poetry in the 'fifties. There is much demonization of Caesar and praise of the noble, upright, virtuous republicans who preceded him. There is very little reference to the disasters and crises that led to Caesar getting his imperial diadem, nor to the fact that the Republic looked nothing like, e.g., the America from which Highest was writing. There were slaves, there were very few citizens etc etc... For want of a better term, I think of this as his liberal conservatism, which also creeps into the sections on the poets: Ovid is a dirty-minded little bugger, nobody should use nasty words in their poems and so on. How, exactly, Highest managed to write a book on Juvenal is beyond me.

The typical biases of a classicist are on display, too: you'd be forgiven for thinking that between the death of Juvenal and the birth of Shakespeare nothing important happened, moreover, that nothing *good* happened. That was the Dark Ages, you see. Thank goodness the Renaissance was born from the head of [insert your hero here], with no input from the centuries preceding it.

And then, what had initially looked like bad scholarship (which it is) eventually came to seem like something else: cold war rhetoric. I doubt Highet intended it, or that he was even conscious of it, but reading this book today, it's fairly obvious: the Roman Republic is the good American Republic; the Roman Empire is the USSR.

If you can extricate the good from the school-marmish silliness, the tiresome acceptance of Renaissance pieties, and the self-righteous Republicanism, this is very enjoyable. But I do worry that people will read this book, and believe what he's saying, rather than reading it for enjoyment, with a skeptical eye. ( )

Just about a lifetime ago I was sitting in a plaza in Rome just across from the Pantheon. I was reading Gunter Grass and the sky was perfect. My luggage made it almost two days after my arrival. I was content. A large bald man with a fain aura of menace sat on the marble steps next to me. He made a comment in a brogue-ish way that it was a lovely day. I concurred with a bit of flourish, saying something ridiculous like its beauty was timeless. I don't think he offered his name but said he was from Ireland. I find it easier to tell people I am from Louisville, Kentucky. Ah, the Kentucky Derby. He pulled out a fifth of vodka. It was 10 a.m. Such lovely horses --he then took a lengthy swallow, though not as long as those last three words he shared with me, they contained centuries of verse.

This is a beautiful book, containing biographical sketches of the greatest pagan poets of Rome. The title indicates the prominence of landscape to this analysis and that is a triumph as well. The ancient soil appears to vibrate, to offer a human humility to the verse which has survived and the trappings of a physical Rome which haven't. ( )

Poets in a Landscape, originally published in 1957 and newly reprinted this year, is Highet’s idiosyncratic account of traveling through Italy, visiting the towns and villages that were home to the great Latin poets—Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Juvenal, among others. It is not like the self-indulgent travel accounts so popular these days, with their endless recitations of meals consumed in small trattorias and wines drunk in olive grove picnics. In fact the personal pronoun “I” almost never appears in the book. And “we” is equally rare—uttered only when Highet and his wife (the espionage writer Helen MacInnes, although he never introduces her) stop to knock on the door of some ancient villa reputed to belong to the poet Horace, or introduce themselves to the caretaker of his newly-excavated country house. There is no food, except what Virgil happens to mention when he talks about farming, and no wine, except what Horace writes about drinking at his Sabine farm. (Although to be fair there is quite a lot of that.) The tone reminds me, instead, of D.H. Lawrence’s Twilight in Italy, or Etruscan Places. Highet, like Lawrence, has his eyes set on more eternal things than the smug satisfaction that comes from a good supper in a strange town.



It was a mad enterprise, to go looking for an Italy that was last seen more than two thousand years ago. But Gilbert Highet, who, as he writes, had spent his life “on the study and interpretation of Roman and Greek history, philosophy, literature, and art”—his reputation as a classical scholar and beloved teacher at Columbia University was already well established—was certain it was there, still showing through the cracks, as it were, of the overlaid presences of Renaissance architecture and Baroque pomp.



He found what he was looking for. “. . . although I knew that much of the Greco-Roman world survived in Italy,” he writes, “still it was a tremendous surprise for me to discover the nature of that survival, and to experience its intensity.” That intensity he speaks of is infused throughout the book, stripping away the modernities of the landscape (meaning, anything dating later than about 100 AD) to show the vistas that would have held the gaze of his ancient poets...full review

This sounds really interesting, doesn't it? Susanna, why haven't you reviewed it? I thought vetting nonfiction books was your job! Letting me down, sister.