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“... Three substantial books on the world of ancient Rome, each in a different idiom. A critic of G.K. Chesterton said that he had a style in which it was impossible to tell the truth; in what style, indeed, can truth be told? Perhaps that aim is altogether too high, and the question should be ‘What style does not condemn us to tell lies?’ To put it in a friendlier way, which sort of sentence do you enjoy reading? There is the Gallic style: ‘The genealogy of ancient education was as follows: from culture to the will to culture, from there to the school, and from the school to the scholastic exercise as an end in itself ...”

“... righteousness which pervade this solid, meritorious but rather stodgy little book. As it happens, Jasper Griffin’s two books protest vigorously against that separation of literature and life which was a final product of Romanticism. They make exhilarating reading. Latin Poets and Roman Life starts with the remark that the Augustan poets of Rome raise ...”

“... Germany and Austria, in the last forty years a body of writing has grown up there which, in Mr Griffin’s phrase, makes ‘intellectually respectable the instinctive response of the audience’. Mr Griffin brings English scholarship up to date by bringing it firmly back to Homer. He generously acknowledges his debt to ...”

“... finest Classicist of our day’, by Peter Green as one his nation ‘ought to bronze’, and by Jasper Griffin as a man ‘one would like to have as a friend’. In his long career he has written on many subjects: scholarly articles on the heroes of Attic drama in its golden age, unsentimental reminiscences of the Spanish Civil War, accounts of ...”

“... Penguin anthology of oral verse, supplies a useful conspectus of the comparative material. Like Jasper Griffin in his brilliant book Homer on Life and Death (1980), Macleod has made use of all this work. He does not believe, as I do, that Homer used writing: but he tells us that he has learned something both from analytic and from formulaic ...”

“... poetry and the life of luxury’ and another on ‘Propertius and Antony’, published by Jasper Griffin in the Journal of Roman Studies for 1976 and 1977. But Syme is not only a writer of books: much of his best work is to be found in his numerous articles and in his occasional reviews. Some have already been collected in Ten Studies in Tacitus ...”

“... dominated student bibliographies; but in the lecture-halls there were signs of a reaction. Jasper Griffin and Oliver Taplin in particular drew attention to the imaginative world of the poet, emphasising unity, humanity and narrative complexity. This seemed a much more rewarding approach to those for whom the most remarkable feature of the epics ...”

“... these 16 essays) is of how many words were originally euphemisms but are not now felt to be so. Jasper Griffin, in a happily sombre account of Greek and Roman euphemisms, adduces ‘execution’, ‘vagina’ and ‘excrement’. Robert Adams gives us ‘syphilis’. Catherine Storr (uncondescendingly tender about children’s euphemisms) reminds us ...”

“... is not any of these things. There is an immense moral seriousness to the Iliad: it conveys – as Jasper Griffin brilliantly showed three decades ago in Homer on Life and Death – the contrast between the darkness of death and the fragile joy of living. But the poem can also be whimsical, magical, ironical and circuitous. Above all it is repeatedly ...”