What a delight to have a new edition of this inspirational book. Highet, professor of classics, broadcaster and literary critic, was famous for his teaching. This book, first published in 1957, is propelled not just by his love for Latin poetry but by a powerful desire to communicate the details of that love, and a manifest skill in doing so. Horace, Catallus, Juvenal and others are conveyed as individuals; Rome as a city of 'boiling streets' to revel in or flee; the varying regional countryside as homeland or retreat. All this is achieved through the meticulous, imaginative use of sparse evidence. The scholarship is cautious but the teaching personal, so that history is enriched, not swamped, with anecdotes. No Latin is assumed, yet through his translations and precisely articulated explanations, Highet conveys the poets' linguistic brilliance and idiosyncrasies. Sadly, the slightly eccentric selection of grainy black and white photographs in the original have gone, and a map would really help. But there is compensation in Michael Putnam's brief, illuminating preface. - Guardian
Highet loved the Latin poets with an obvious passion and his way with verse was second only to his sense of place. - Scotsman
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