A Literary History of Rome!

Our books today are two oldies but goodies, A Literary History of Rome from the Origins to the Close of the Golden Age (1909) and A Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age from Tiberius to Hadrian (1927) by J. Wright Duff, who labored over them for a huge chunk of his life and brought forth a two-volume masterpiece the equal of which you’ll be hard-pressed to find no matter how long you comb the Classics section of every used bookstore you visit.

Duff was a classicist of the old school, as thoroughly conversant with that choice ancient company as he was with the faces at his dinner table. But he brings to his books much more than simple linguistic mastery; he studies the breadth of Roman literature with rigor but also with a deep sympathetic understanding that brought his books hymns of praise from all quarters (including a certain pince-nez’d Commander-in-Chief who consumed the first volume, argued with it, and said it encouraged him to re-visit many of the classics he’d last read in college). Put simply, he’s a marvelous writer – and it’s amazing (although it shouldn’t be) that his literary appreciations ‘stand up’ so well even after a century. Take his take on the Roman playwright Plautus, for instance:

Primarily, Plautus’s object was not to lecture but to amuse, and yet there is more than infinite jest and trickery in him. If he was no deep student of human nature and no deep thinker on human destiny, he did not lack feeling for the earnest of life. With his merry laughter went broad sympathies. His own outlook on existence must have coloured the character of some of the slaves whom he paints with zest – a cheerful attitude to what seems a game, a readiness to take one’s luck and to rise above untoward events buoyant and resourceful. Mirth is not necessarily stone-blind to sadness; so comedy, while it laughs, may contain real criticism of life as tragedy.

But because we’re talking about a Victorian education here, Duff’s books rest in a comfortable downy context of literary allusions from the entire canons of four modern literatures as well as three ancient ones. This was an era – perhaps the greatest such era – when it was no sin of elitism to be well-read, and no ancient author evokes that quality quite like Cicero in his letters (which even I, no fan of Cicero, am prepared to sing as the masterpieces their author knew they were):

The author’s varying moods are naively reflected. He can write like Horace Walpole at his airiest or Cowper at his gravest. He has some of the coxcombry of the former an something of the tragic personality of the latter. Cicero is not starched by the consciousness of impending publication as Seneca, Pliny, and Madame de Sevigne all were. He shows more freedom than Gray. There is no affected pull towards artificialism as in the case of Burns’s letters. He has Byron’s frankness, if he lacks his sparkle. Colloquial turns are lavishly introduced. With certain correspondents – most of all with Atticus – he sprinkles his sentences with Greek, as we might use a handy French word in a letter, but sometimes solely because of Atticus’s Greek tastes.

A Literary History of Rome joyously bristles with erudition and yet is an unmixed pleasure to read. Its reception has become fairly exclusive, I fear: Duff’s pace will quickly shake off readers who are just hearing the names “Tacitus” or “Pliny” for the first time, and it never occurs to him that his readers won’t possess Latin and French – and possibly German and ancient Greek as well. His footnotes are a marvel of study, but the number of general readers who’d be able to marvel at them today has dwindled severely since Duff’s day.

Even so! Even so, there are wonders in these two volumes for any fan of ancient literature! Just the other day, I wrote about how embattled university presses provide their readers with so much excellent stuff readers would be hard-pressed to find anywhere else. That same article mentioned that another, often-overlooked function of such presses is to reprint scholarly works that would otherwise disappear forever. A Literary History of Rome is exactly such a work and deserves exactly such a reprint. After all, the last outfit to reprint these volumes was boring old Barnes & Noble.