Richard Jenkyns

Jenkyns is the ideal instructor: well-informed, enthusiastic, organized. He's able to convey the material to the reader who is a novice in this area without condescension; his references to people and events outside the area of classical literature are drawn from high culture (Wagner, Shakespeare, Wilde) rather than pop culture. This should not be taken to mean that Jenkyns is in any way uptight: he gives full attention to the bawdy, scurrilous, and polysexual elements of the works he discusses. (Typing that last list reminds me of one minor irritation with the book: this Oxford professor for some reason eschews the Oxford comma). The author gives his own assessment of the various works he discusses and, logically if perhaps somewhat controversially, includes the books of the New Testament among Graeco-Roman literature in the period he covers.

While Jenkyns discusses almost 1000 years of literature written in Greek and Latin, the book itself, like Jonson's Shakespeare, contains "little Latin and less Greek", with almost no quotations from the works in their original language. This is occasionally frustrating as, by Jenkyn's own description, the content and art of Greek and Latin verse was highly dependent on skilled use of meter, but examples of metrical conventions and inventiveness are described second hand without explicit examples. I can't quite mark this as a fault, as it's very possible that such detailed technical digression may well have served as a thorny obstacle on the otherwise clear and navigable path the author has prepared for the reader.

The book does have, however, a more serious failing related to the language issue. The purpose of this book is obviously to serve as an introduction to classical literature for the Anglophone reader with little or no Greek or Latin, but Jenkyns provides no discussion of translations nor any bibliography. Having been guided so expertly through the history of the first millennium of Western literature, the reader is left to their own devices as to going deeper into the subject.
Jenkyns, in fact, seems reluctant to mention other modern authors or works in the field under discussion. Although his endnotes carefully detail the sources of his quotations from the works of the Classical authors, no post-Classical works are cited in them. In introducing Aristotle he quotes two lengthy and contradictory assessments, neither of which is sourced. (These are the two quotations on pp. 95-96 beginning, "The history of western philosophy can be described as a series of footnotes to Plato (A. N. Whitehead)" and "Aristotle was the greatest intellect of the ancient world, and perhaps of any age.")

Overview:

1. Homer - The Iliad and The Odyssey
2. Archaic Greece (excursus on how ancient literature survived)
Hesiod - Theogony, Works and Days
Presocratics: Thales, Empedocles
'Homeric hymns'
Elegies - Solon, Theognis, Xenophanes, Mimnermus, Archilochus, Semonides of Amorgos
Lyrics - Alcman, Sappho, Alcaeus, Stesichorus, Anacreon
Choral - Simonides, Bacchylides, Pindar
3. The Rise of Tragedy and History
Aeschylus (not the author of Prometheus Bound?)
Herodotus and Thucydides
4. The Later Fifth Century
Sophocles
Euripides - Medea, Bacchae, Trojan Women, Suppliants, Children of Heracles, Helen, Ion, Hippolytus
Aristophanes - Clouds, Birds, Frogs, Peace, Lysistrata, Acharians, Thesmoporia Ladies, Assemblywomen, Waps, Knights, Wealth
5. The Fourth Century
Xenophon - Education of Cyrus, Anabasis
Rhetoric - Gorgias, Lysias, Isocrates, Aeschines, Demosthenes
Philosophy - Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Zeno of Citium (Stoicism)
6. The Hellenistic Age
Callimachus, Apollonius of Rhodes, Theocritus - Idylls
Herondas, Aratus, Lycophron - Alexandra
Nicander, Moschus, Bion, "Wisdom of Solomon"
Historian - Polybius (subject was Rome)
7. The Roman Republic
Ennius
Terence (Brothers, Girl from Andros), Plautus (The Braggart Soldier, Captives)
Pacuvius, Accius, Lucilius (satura), Varro
Cicero (The Nature of the Gods, For Caelius, Philippics, Republic, Laws, De Finibus, Against Piso, For Murena)
Lucretius - The Nature of Things
Catullus
8. Virgil
Georgics introduces story of Orpheus and Eurydice
9. The Augustan Age
Tibullus, Propertius, Horace, Ovid
Manilius (Astronomy)
Historians - Julius Caesar, Sallust, Pollio, Livy
10. After the Augustans
Seneca
Lucan - Civil Wars unfinished epic
Paul of Tarsus, Mark, Luke, Matthew, John
Statius, Martial, Pliny the Younger (letters)
Greek - Dio Chrysostom, Plutarch
Tacitus, Juvenal
11. Two Novels
Greek: Longus - Pastoral Tale of Daphnis and Chloe, John of Patmos
Petronius - Satyrica, Apuleius - Metapmorphoses (The Golden Ass)
12. Epilogue
A short meditation on the meaning of "classical" and the heritage of the Greeks and Romans. Mentions Augustines Confessions as first "confessional memoir".

The full NYRB Bowersock review.… (plus d'informations)

This is an excellent coverage of the Victorian reception of classical Greek literature, language, and art. It extends itself a bit in time, looking back to the Romantics (Shelley and Byron both playing significant roles) and forward to the Modernists (Eliot and Jones, in particular) to better situate the Victorians themselves. By restricting itself to the Victorians proper -- principally English, a few Scots and Irish -- the book gains strength, because the interconnectedness of that intellectual world prevents the observations from being a detached set of discrete observations: Jowett, Farrar, Disraeli, Gladstone, (George) Eliot, Pater, Ruskin, Wilde, Hardy et al. were all influencing and being influenced by each other (which is, of course, why we recognize "Victorian" as having a more substantive value than just a chronological tag).

Jenkyns has a wide and deep understanding not only of the period but of the classical sources in question, and is effective in delineating the differences between the Victorians' views and ours, notably of classical tragedy and Homer.

This is in many ways an irretrievably vanished world: between that world and ours is fixed the great gulf represented by Dodds (The Greeks and the Irrational) and Milman Parry, to say nothing of the evacuation of classical education from the general curricula of humane letters; but that doesn't mean that it's not both interesting in itself and enlightening as a contrast to our own.… (plus d'informations)

Classical Literature is a good, readable overview of the history of Greek and Latin literature from Homer through the AD 100s. He touches on all of the major authors: Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, Thucydides, Vergil, Ovid, Horace, inter alios. There's an entire chapter dedicated to Greek drama. But at the same time he also remembers the writers who are less well known, mostly because their work has not come down to us, but were key to the development of literature at the time. I, for one, appreciate that. I also really enjoyed his section on the Apostle Paul and his place as a classical writer. All too often, I think we forget that the New Testament was not written in a vacuum and that it has a place in literature as well as religion. So if you're at all interested in classical literature, this a book worth picking up. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in Greek or Latin literature, the Classics, or the history of literature.… (plus d'informations)