The Oxford Book of Latin Verse / From the earliest fragments to the end of the Vth Century A.D.
The plan of this volume is governed by exclusion as much as inclusion. Its editor gathers Latin verse from the earliest priestly fragments—the Saliar and Arval incantations placating gods of lightning and blight—through to the late invocation of Phocas, omitting epic, drama, and satire as ill-suited to anthology by excerpt. Horace appears only in his lyrics; Juvenal and Persius are set aside; Christian poetry is largely barred, though great didactic passages from Lucretius, Vergil, and Manilius are plucked like "golden branches" from their contexts. Throughout, the editor labours over the texts themselves, offering revised recensions and quietly smoothing lacunae for the reader's sake.
Spanning more than a thousand years, the collection traces the Roman poetic genius from rude ceremonial magic to refined art, charting how a people's dread of an unknown spiritual world matured into enduring verse. It matters as a curated map of taste and judgement—deciding what counts as poetry and why—preserving the fragments that Time and Fate themselves left in excerpt, and inviting readers to encounter Latin verse at its most genuinely felt.
How it begins
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.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.