No More Learning

Chosen by

H. W. Garrod

Fellow of Merton College.

Oxford

At the Clarendon Press

FIRST PUBLISHED 1912

REPRINTED 1921, 1926, 1934, 1940 1943, 1947, 1952, 1964, 1968

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN




PREFACE


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.

Satire finds no place in this book. Horace is represented only by his
lyrics. Juvenal and Persius are not represented at all. The _Satires_
and _Epistles_ of Horace are books of deep and wide influence. They have
taught lessons in school which have been remembered in the world. They
have made an appeal to natures which teaching more profound and
spiritual leaves untouched. By their large temper and by their complete
freedom from cant they have achieved a place in the regard of men from
which they are not likely to be dislodged by any changes of literary
fashion or any fury of the enemies of humane studies. I am content to
leave them in this secure position, and not to intrude them into a
Collection where Horace himself would have known them to be out of
place. Indeed, he has himself said upon this subject all that needs to
be said. [1] Persius similarly, in the Prologue to his _Satires_,
excludes himself from the company of the great poets. Nor can I believe
that Juvenal has any place among them. In the rhetoric of rancour he is
a distinguished practitioner. But he wants two qualities essential to
great poetry--truth and humanity. I say this because there are critics
who speak of Juvenal as though he were Isaiah.