Now forty-odd years old, this book has established itself as a minor classic, or quite simply as a classic. Appropriately, Highet was an American classicist (apparently of good standing academically) and he created a labour of love not only for his favourite Latin poets, but for Italy and the Italian landscape. Catullus, Vergil (yes, very properly he spells it that way), the enigmatic Propertius, Horace, Tibullus, Ovid and Juvenal are all brought alive and breathing, while the landscape or ambience they lived in is described and contrasted with what it has become today - or rather, what it was in the 1950s. The writing is sensitive and notably intelligent, backed up by Highet's competent verse ren derings from the Latin, and to cap it all he give a pen-picture of Rome itself at its imperial apex. Here is scholarship in the old sense, humane, unpedantic, open-minded and totally free of academic jargon.
Brian Fallon