Ed. by Mark Walker

Pineapple Publications (2015) p/b 195pp £4.99 (ISBN 978095474343)

In 1850 the editors of Sabrinae Corolla gloomily observed, of verse composition, that these were studia quae veremur ne in dies obsolescant. They were premature, and 50 or more years later no less a scholar than Wilamowitz commended the English for keeping up a practice which was dying out in Germany. And he could have pointed to distinguished practitioners: Benjamin Hall Kennedy, H.A.J. Munro, Sir Richard Jebb, Gilbert Murray, and many others of high scholarly achievement. Even up to the 1960s a group of Oxford classical scholars (including Bowra, Denniston and Platnauer) were able to publish Some (and then More) Oxford Compositions, which included prose and verse, in both languages, of very high quality.

The up-to-date book under notice here, edited by W., confines itself to Latin verse, mainly in hexameters and elegiacs; but many other…