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Gilbert Highet. The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xl, 763. $29.95 (pb.). ISBN 978-0-19-937769-5. With a new foreword by Harold Bloom.
The Classical Tradition, first published in 1949 and reissued in 2015 (its third reissue in paperback), ranks as perhaps the most famous of all the books published by one of the twentieth century's most respected classicists. It provides a sweeping, unprecedented examination of the Greek and Roman influences on Western literature from the fall of classical civilization through the middle of the twentieth century. Its author, Gilbert Highet (1906-1978), a remarkable teacher/scholar who taught at Columbia University for thirty-five years, published roughly one thousand items, including twenty-one books.1
When Cyril Bailey, whom Highet regarded as his best teacher at Oxford, read The Classical Tradition, he wrote to Highet: "I can't see how any one man can have done it . . . I wonder that you are alive" (January 4, 1950). One may well wonder where Highet found the time to write a book of this magnitude between his three-volume translation of Werner Jaeger's Paideia: die Formung des griechischen Menschen (Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, Oxford 1939-1945) and The Art of Teaching (New York 1950). Classics reviewers of that day regarded Highet's 1949 book as an important pioneering work, as a stimulating, crisply written,...