The Classical Anthology

This previously unpublished Pindaric Ode was composed in Latin by Alan Treloar (1919-2011), a well-known Australian Classical polyglot. It was one of several he wrote in letters to me, this […]

When translating this commentary three or four years ago, the first sentence of this passage filled me with such wonder that it was not possible to proceed with the work […]

This exquisite description paints an image in the heart which reminds us of the innate beauty of the human being. Were it not for the sweet grace of love, its kinship, […]

After my first year studying Classics at university I found that the life seemed to have gone out of it because it had all become a mere intellectual exercise. Luckily […]

A neglected literary giant whose works have fallen into near-oblivion, Landor was also one of the 19th century’s most quixotic figures – a genius to some, eccentric madman to others. […]

John Jortin was one of a circle of poets at Cambridge who were actively producing Latin verses at the same time as Antony Alsop and his Oxford contemporaries. In contrast […]

Dubbed ‘the English Horace’ by David Money in his book of that title, Alsop was ‘looked upon to be the best Writer of Lyric Verses in the World’ according to […]

The critic Charles Lamb described Vincent Bourne as ‘the most classical, and at the same time, most English, of the Latinists’, and he described Bourne’s Epitaphium in Canem as ‘the […]

Little is known of the life of Vincent Bourne, perhaps the most accessible of all the Anglo-Latin poets. He was educated at  Westminster School, England’s nursery for 18th-century Latinists, and […]

Like any educated man of his age, Swift was perfectly capable of writing Latin verse when the mood took him – whether in humorous verse epistles to his friend Joseph […]