Classical Literature!

Our book today is Classical Literature: An Epic Journey from Homer to Virgil and Beyond by emeritus Oxford don Richard Jenkyns. The book is an alarmingly thin perambulation through the whole of the classics from the Homeric era through the Augustan Age and a little bit beyond, a hurried tour that’s saved from being a mere trot only by the wit and erudition of its author. When it was originally published in the UK, the book was part of the “Pelican Introduction” series, and even in its beautiful repackaging by Basic Books, something of the taste of basic instruction still lingers around these pages.

That isn’t fatal, of course, and Jenkyns regularly raises the tone of the proceedings in any case. He takes his readers through the broader outlines of classical literature at a clip that largely prevents any kind of in-depth analysis, but even when touching on extremely well-known scenes, he can invoke pleasing multiplicities:

When Achilles chases Hector round the walls of Troy, the poet compares the scene to a chariot race, ‘and all the gods looked on’. The comparison is telling: when we go to the big match, we believe ourselves to be passionately involved, bu we leave the stadium and our lives are unchanged. The gods too, of whom some support the Achaeans, others the Trojans, can seem passionately partisan, but in the end their emotions are superficial. One might compare the apocryphal Chinese curse: ‘May you live in interesting times’. It is the gods’ blessing to be flat and simple, and the curse of man to be interesting. The last book contains two reconciliations or comings together. That between the gods is fairly brief and straightforward. That between two men, Achilles and Priam, is far more difficult, complex and profound.

And he’s especially enjoyable when he deviates from the massive masterworks of the canon in order to bustle around briefly in the less pieces:

Pliny’s other surviving work is his Panegyric, a long oration buttering Trajan up with lavish praise. After every allowance has been made for the conventions of the time, it remains impossible to like. Most of it is tedious, but it does contain one remarkable passage in which Trajan’s presence in his palace, a broad calm in the midst of Rome’s bustle, is contrasted with the bad emperor Domitian’s earlier existence there, skulking fearfully in the small back rooms. The atmospheric evocation of a spacious, almost numinous interior provides a moment of unexpected poetry.

Classical Literature easily manages to be entertaining, but it also provokes and enlightens and will please even readers who know Jenkyns’ subjects backwards and forwards, and newcomers will get a smoothly urbane and often sparkling introduction to a body of writing they’ll want to explore a great deal more. “The ancient Greeks and Romans are our parents,” Jenkyns writes, “and on the whole they have been good parents.” He does an excellent job making the appropriate introductions.