Latin Without Tears

POETS IN A LANDSCAPE (267 pp.)--Gilbert Highet--Knopf ($6.50).

OVID'S THE ART OF LOVE (206 pp.)--translated by Rolfe Humphries--Indiana University ($3.75; paperback, $1.45).

A book is born; a classic is forever reborn. Each generation supplies its own Pygmalions--men with the love and skill to breathe new life into the literary monuments of the past. As Pygmalions to the ancient Roman poets, two lifelong classics scholars and teachers, Gilbert Highet (Columbia) and Rolfe Humphries (now a lecturer at New York City's Hunter College after 32 years at Long Island's Woodmere Academy), have love and skill to spare. Poet Humphries renders Ovid's famed, amoral The Art of Love in its most readable translation since Dryden's, including in his book much of Ovid's remaining love poetry. Critic Highet assembles an ingratiating montage of seven Latin poets (Catullus, Vergil, Propertius, Horace, Tibiillus. Ovid. Juvenal), combining samples of the poetry, biographical sketches, bits of social history and a latter-day tour of his heroes' haunts.

A Pang Among Flowers. Highet's book places its poets at their geographical point of departure (Catullus at Verona, Vergil near Mantua, etc.) and takes them to their common destination. Rome. Even more fascinating than their individual styles and talents, which Author Highet expertly analyzes, is a common historical drama linking the seven together in a way which Author Highet suggests but perhaps never sufficiently emphasizes. The eldest, Catullus, died around 54 B.C., ten years before Caesar was assassinated; the youngest, Juvenal, was born around 60 A.D., six years after Nero came to power. In little more than a century these poets witnessed the death of the republic and the rise and corruption of the empire. Whether lyric or satiric, they were poets of disenchantment ("A bitterness arose, a pang among the flowers"), and melancholy broods between their lines.

They were double men, harking back nostalgically to the rustic, roughhewn virtues of the Romans who fought the Punic Wars, while themselves breathing the elegant, enervating and sometimes fetid air of imperial Rome. They tended to polish more than to publish. Only Vergil attempted the epic, and he thought so poorly of The Aeneid that on his deathbed he asked to destroy the manuscript. Catullus, Propertius and Tibullus were ravaged by hard-boiled mistresses, and their poems tell of virtually the only battle they ever fought--the war between the sexes. They knew or sensed that their culture was on its long day's journey into night--and suggested mostly pleasure to ease the journey. But they were not without stoic courage, and Catullus could spurn Caesar with an epigram:

I am not really anxious for your approval, Caesar.

Whether you're white or black, I do not care.

Arbiter of Dalliance. If Publius Ovidius Naso (i.e., "Big Nose") had any qualms about the decadence of Augustan Rome, it can only be inferred, as in Restoration comedy, from the intensity of his frivolity. "Every age probably regards itself as unique in its sexual sophistication," says Translator Humphries. In a city of such sophisticates, Ovid, whose unlikely origin was the hard, bitter soil of Abruzzi (where he was born 2,000 years ago last month), became the elegant arbiter of sexual dalliance. The Art of Love has no four-letter words, only four-letter situations. Written in a sportively professorial tone, it tells the young amorist where to pick up a girl, how to outfox a jealous husband or mistress, how to brazen out an infidelity (lie about it). It also offers a whole dictionary of lovers' lore, from aphrodisiacs ("Others say pepper is good") to proper grooming ("Let your toga fit well, never a spot on its white"). Translator Humphries, who has also translated Ovid's Metamorphoses (TIME, May 23, 1955), wears his scholarship as loosely as a toga, and occasionally carries colloquialism to the point of topical slanginess ("Imagine her fitted by Dior!"). Ovid, Humphries argues, would have done the same. In a faintly disguised account of his own liaisons about town (The Loves), Ovid sees a love affair in two lights--either as sunlit sensuality or as a kind of mock-heroic comedy.

Now let triumphant laurels crown my

brow! We've won; here in my arms Corinna

lies.

No husbands, guardians, hostile doors

can now

Prevail, defraud me of my lovely prize. And what a signal victory: all hail, Great strategist, by whom no blood was

shed, No walls assailed, no warriors clad in

mail, Only a girl brought peaceably to bed.

Ovid was banished from Rome for the last nine years of his life, possibly for some act so flagrant that he himself thought it too scandalous to confide to posterity. It can be said of Ovid, as Hilaire Belloc once hoped for himself: "His sins were scarlet, but his books were read." Rarely have they read more delightfully than in Humphries' jaunty recreation of the urbane amorist's pagan high spirits:

Redheads, or blondes, or brunettes, no

matter; I'm theirs for the taking.

Dark complexion or fair, I'm not the

fellow to care . . . All-embracing. I think, is the proper

term for my passion; There's not a sweetheart in town I'd be reluctant to love.

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