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[Patguy]

Since 1912, the Harvard University Press has reprinted just about every classical text more interesting than Nero's laundry list. (Okay, maybe that would be pretty interesting.) To celebrate the publication of their 500th volume, they've released this, a kind of laundry list itself. It's a small book of about 230 pages, half of which are in Latin or Ancient Greek, with the translations on the facing pages. It contains selections from, in order, Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Sophocles, Euripedes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Callimachus, Josephus, Plutarch, Lucian, Pausanius, Terence, Cicero, Caesar (the first one), Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, Livy, Propertius, Ovid, Manilius, Seneca, Pliny, Petronius, Pliny the Younger, Juvenal, Apuleius and Jerome. That averages just under 31/2 pages per author, so you're not exactly getting a full classical education here.

Pleas note that I know very little Latin and not a shred of Ancient Greek, so my impressions are purely based on the English translations. Caveat.

Of the authors here, I'd previously read substantial amounts of most of the Greeks (but who the hell is Callimachus?) and, except for Virgil, none of the Romans. The usual cliché is that the Roman writers are inferior, having just ripped off their poetics from the Greeks. I find little here that would make me feel differently. The selection from Virgil's Aeneid (Aeneas relates the fall of Troy) is the best Latin piece here, and the next contender is Caesar's "how to build a bridge" manual from the Gallic Wars. Petronius's description of Trimalchio's feast is entertaining as far as it goes, but I suspect it benefits from the retroactive glamour of having inspired The Great Gatsby.

As for the Greeks, the editors stack the deck a little in Plato's favor by excerpting the sentimental last hours of Socrates (from the Phaedo) instead of, for instance, any of the Republic's creepy politics or the *ahem* awfully gay Symposium.

(In fact there's little homoerotic about any of these selections, which is an oversight. The Loebs have had a bad reputation for bowdlerizing texts—up to and including switching gender pronouns in the translations!—but that's supposed to be all better now. Well, it's too small a sample to generalize from. But check out Wikipedia's wobbly and schizophrenic entry on Alexander's personal life to see how desperately some people still want to believe that the ancients were 100% straight. Yes he was! No he wasn't! They didn't have those categories back then! La la la, I'm not listening!)

Back to the matter at hand. It's nice to see that even the tiny selection from Aristotle's Poetics gives a sense of his brilliant scientific mind and analytical rigor. What a strange time, when entire armies could be swayed one way or another by ambiguous omens, and the Athenian Senate could debate, with a weird mixture of piety and political cynicism, Alexander's claim to be a god. In the middle of all that, one of history's supreme rationalists.

What else? Josephus talks about the great fortress of Masada, but not its eventual destruction by the Romans. Plutarch gives an encomium to the gravely misunderstood Brutus. Cicero makes a strong—and to my mind, quite moving—case for a civil society governed by laws. The author of the Octavia (attributed here to Seneca) sharpens the knives and ventriloquizes the shade of Agrippina venomously denouncing Nero, her a$$hole of a son. The younger Pliny reports on the eruption of Vesuvius, and Juvenal's satire on life in Rome make me glad to be living in the present day.

There's also some worthless astrological babble from Manilius, and the expected business with Odysseus and the Cyclops, Antigone and Creon, Medea and her kids, and Lysistrata's proposition to the Spartan women (for the record, the word gets translated here as "prick"). Herodotus and Thucydides both impress, and they've jumped a few steps up my to-read list. Actually I could do worse than read more of most of the writers here. In translation.