A Summer of Ancient Poets

by

Nicki Leone

Because of Gilbert Highet, I will always associate the Latin poets with the high shriek of cicadas in the southern summer, and the relentless heat of the August sun turning the air thick and liquid. Summers in the South beat down on you, even the bees in the flowers look stupefied. It’s an effort to move as far as it takes to reach for a glass of lemonade, which is perhaps why I picked up Highet’s book Poets in a Landscape in the first place. If you can barely bestir yourself from your own chair, why not read a book about someone who has gone a-wandering?

Poets in a Landscape, originally published in 1957 and newly reprinted this year, is Highet’s idiosyncratic account of traveling through Italy, visiting the towns and villages that were home to the great Latin poets—Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Juvenal, among others. It is not like the self-indulgent travel accounts so popular these days, with their endless recitations of meals consumed in small trattorias and wines drunk in olive grove picnics. In fact the personal pronoun “I” almost never appears in the book. And “we” is equally rare—uttered only when Highet and his wife (the espionage writer Helen MacInnes, although he never introduces her) stop to knock on the door of some ancient villa reputed to belong to the poet Horace, or introduce themselves to the caretaker of his newly-excavated country house. There is no food, except what Virgil happens to mention when he talks about farming, and no wine, except what Horace writes about drinking at his Sabine farm. (Although to be fair there is quite a lot of that.) The tone reminds me, instead, of D.H. Lawrence’s Twilight in Italy, or Etruscan Places. Highet, like Lawrence, has his eyes set on more eternal things than the smug satisfaction that comes from a good supper in a strange town.

It was a mad enterprise, to go looking for an Italy that was last seen more than two thousand years ago.  But Gilbert Highet, who, as he writes, had spent his life “on the study and interpretation of Roman and Greek history, philosophy, literature, and art”—his reputation as a classical scholar and beloved teacher at Columbia University was already well established—was certain it was there, still showing through the cracks, as it were, of the overlaid presences of Renaissance architecture and Baroque pomp.

He found what he was looking for. “. . . although I knew that much of the Greco-Roman world survived in Italy,” he writes, “still it was a tremendous surprise for me to discover the nature of that survival, and to experience its intensity.” That intensity he speaks of is infused throughout the book, stripping away the modernities of the landscape (meaning, anything dating later than about 100 AD) to show the vistas that would have held the gaze of his ancient poets. Of the view of Lake Sirmio, for example, where Catullus had a country house:

The air is clear and cool there. It moved constantly; the lake water is seldom still; marching clouds move over the distant mountains; contours and lights change and develop. This is not a soft and sleepy landscape. Wherever the eye falls, there are strong-boned hills, and ridges climbing higher and higher to the Alps . . . the ground is ridged and hummocked. It is covered with tall grass, bushes and wild parsley. This is too chill and windy to shelter many colonies of birds, but a few hardy creatures hop and flutter among the stones. They are sparrows—the seventh hundredth descendants of Lesbia’s doomed pet. Among them, one single black butterfly wavers and careens in the wind. The olive-trees, descendants of those which Catullus owned, are planted in regular rows; but they hate regimentations. Each of them has grown into a different shape, knotted and bitter, strengthened but tortured by its constant battle against the wind from the mountains.

“Lesbia’s doomed pet” is a little sparrow that Catullus wrote a very famous plea to, envying the way it held the attention of its owner, when all the poet wanted was for Lesbia to turn her eyes upon himself:

Tell me, sparrow, you darling of my darling,
whom she plays with and fondles in her bosom,
you who peck when she offers you a finger
(beak outthrust in a counterfeit of biting),
when that radiant star of my aspiring
turns towards you, as a pleasant little playmate
one small bird, to console her burning passion—
could I possibly play with you as she does,
could I lighten the pain that still torments me?

The translation is Highet’s own. There are others, of course, but he seems to have been dissatisfied with extant translations when he wrote his book, and took great pains to create his own, more faithful to the original Latin hexameter. “The Latin elegiac couplet cannot be properly translated by the English heroic couplet” the author insists.

The reader, however, has only the vaguest notion of what that means, and does not read Latin herself. I went looking for translations of Catullus, and spent a few days reading about the doomed affair between the passionate young poet and Clodia—whom he calls “Lesbia”—Rome’s most notorious lady. His infatuation was not returned, at least, not for very long, and the lady eventually moved on to more amusing pursuits. In fact, Clodia apparently lived for the pleasures of the moment. If they had revolving doors in ancient Rome, the one to her bedchamber would have always been turning. Cicero would later speak of her at a trial (not her own) as a harlot. And Catullus, eventually, bitterly, left her:

Calius, Lesbia—she, our Lesbia—Oh, that
only Lesbia, whom Catullus only
loved as never himself and all his dearest,
now on highways and byways seeks her lovers,
strips all Rome’s noble great-souled sons of their money

That, notes Edith Hamilton in The Roman Way, is the last we know of Clodia and her poet.

And this is how it would go, throughout the book. The author would describe the irrigated fields around Mantua, and I would find myself a copy of Virgil’s Georgics—a lengthy and very beautiful poem about the art of farming. He and his wife would wander up into the Sabine hills to the newly excavated house of Horace, and I would ponder three different editions of the poet’s Odes, bewildered by the strange differences in the translations but still able to glean his affection for his farm, for a quiet life free from the sycophantic politics of the city. Poets in a Landscape became, as I read, less like a travel book to while away a hot afternoon, and more like a field trip, a loving tour of the writer’s favorite things about his favorite Latin poets.

And in this way, the book is utterly beguiling. Or maybe what I mean to say is that it opens a door into a world that is utterly beguiling. Because—let us be honest—unless you are a classicist yourself (I am not) your idea of ancient Rome is probably dominated by visions of ruined landmarks, crumbling aqueducts, and endless military engagements. Unless you happen to watch television or go to the movies. Then your idea of Rome is a little more salacious.

I, however, was beguiled, and not by Clodia’s wanton demeanor or “ox-eyed” beauty (Cicero’s description, that, and he was being complimentary when he said it). There was a time when I read history for how it was strange and exotic. But now, I am captivated by how it is familiar. Twenty years ago I would not have seen past the togas and the men in makeup and perfume, and the almost daily carnage that passed for entertainment in the Roman circus. But in Highet’s Rome there is also this—a young man who is arrested by the sight of a pretty lady playing with a bird.

Or Virgil, who writes how a flock of birds will betray an oncoming storm before even a cloud shows in the sky in the way they will suddenly all take uneasy flight, and how serving girls at work at their looms and mending, know the same by the way their oil lamps flicker in the restless night air:

Then, the impudent crow calls down rain with a loud caw
and struts, a solitary bird, upon the shore’s dry sand.
Even girls, working their spindles at night, are not
unaware of a coming storm when they see the oil’s flame
gutter in the lamp and a crust of mold grow on its wick.

—Georgics, Book I lines 388-392, translated by Janet Lembke

Or the way Horace loves wine, fears shipwrecks (he was practically thalassophobic), and  who just missed getting killed when a tree on his farm fell unexpectedly right in front of him, causing him to burst out with a curse in his surprise and anger:

He planted you on a malignant day, whoever
first tamped your roots down, tree; with a cursed hand
he raised you to blight the future
and shame the countryside.

He throttled his own father, I’d believe,
and spattered his fireplace with a guest’s blood at night;
he deals in Colchian poisons
and any crime cooked up

In the mind of man, the one who established you
in my field, rotten, corrupted tree, to fall
all of a sudden on the head
of your innocent master.

—Odes II.13, translated by Rosanna Warren

You know, earlier this year when my brother and I attempted to fell a small tree and it came down in an unexpected direction, all I could think to say was “son of a bitch!”

The end result was that Poets in a Landscape became not a summer day’s piece of entertainment, an escape from the relentless heat, but a kind of literary journey that took far, far longer to traverse than its scant 248 pages would have suggested. I’m afraid I spent weeks on Virgil and the Georgics alone, mesmerized by its extremely poetic and vividly graphic description of how to remove mangy skin from a sick sheep with a knife. I’ll spare you the quote.

The Rome Highet looks for in is travels may be buried under two thousand years of silt and dirt, but it is still vividly before him—in the rivers and streams which still bear the same names even two millennia later, in the villages whose names still carry linguistic hints to their antiquity, and where one can still occasionally find the odd carved rock bearing a dedication to some local temple where Horace mentions sacrificing a goat, in the vistas that open up from rocky cliffs near the country where Catullus wasted away, discarded by his lady. It is an Italy that he says “became as real to me as it never had before.”

And it becomes startlingly real to the reader, as well. Highet says in his introduction that his book is “meant for those who love Italy, and for those who love poetry.” A reader might pick it up because he is one of the former. But by the time he is done, he will be one of the latter.

Books mentioned in this column:
Poets in a Landscape by Gilbert Highet (NYRB Classics, 2010)
DH Lawrence and Italy: Twilight in Italy, Sea and Sardinia, Etruscan Places by DH Lawrence (Penguin, 1997)
The Roman Way by Edith Hamilton (W.W. Norton, 1993) 
Virgil’s Georgics: A New Verse Translation by Janet Lembke (Yale University Press, 2005)
Horace, The Odes: New Translations by Contemporary Poets edited by J.D. McClatchy (Princeton University Press, 2002)
The Poems of Catullus: A Bilingual Edition, translated by Peter Green (University of California Press, 2005) 

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.