The Oxford Book of Latin Verse / From the earliest fragments to the end of the Vth Century A.D.

From the earliest fragments to the end of the V th Century a.d.
Oxford At the Clarendon Press
FIRST PUBLISHED 1912 REPRINTED 1921, 1926, 1934, 1940 1943, 1947, 1952, 1964, 1968
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

The plan of this book excludes epic and the drama, and in general so much of Roman poetry as could be included only by a licence of excerpt mostly dangerous and in poetry of any architectonic pretensions intolerable. If any one remarks as inconsistent with this plan the inclusion of the more considerable fragments of Ennius and the early tragedians, I will only say that I have not thought it worth while to be wiser here than Time and Fate, which have of their own act given us these poets in lamentable excerpt. A more real inconsistency may be found in my treatment of the didactic poets. It seemed a pity that Didactic Poetry—in some ways the most characteristic product of the Roman genius—should, in such a Collection as this, be wholly unrepresented. It seemed a pity: and it seemed also on the whole unnecessary. It seemed unnecessary, for the reason that many of the great passages of Lucretius, Vergil, and Manilius hang so loosely to their contexts that the poets themselves seem to invite the gentle violence of the excerptor. These passages are 'golden branches' set in an alien stock— non sua seminat arbos . The hand that would pluck them must be at once courageous and circumspect. But they attend the fated despoiler:
Ergo alte uestiga oculis et rite repertum carpe manu, namque ipse uolens facilisque sequetur si te fata uocant.
Even outside Didactic Poetry I have allowed myself an occasional disloyalty to my own rule against excerpts. I have, for example, detached one or two lyrics from the Tragedies of Seneca. And, again, from the long and sometimes tedious Itinerarium of Rutilius I have detached the splendid apostrophe to Rome which stands in the forefront of that poem. These are pieces without which no anthology of Latin poetry would be anything but grotesquely incomplete. And after all we should be the masters and not the slaves of our own rules.