This is the second volume of the Robson Classical Lectures to reach publication. The series takes its name from Donald Oakley Robson (1905–76), who graduated in Honours Classics from Victoria College in the University of Toronto in 1928. He went on to earn his MA (1929) and his PhD (1932) from the University of Toronto. After teaching at the University of Western Ontario for seventeen years, he returned to hisalma mater,and taught Latin there from 1947 until his retirement in 1975. His wife, Rhena Victoria Kendrick (1901–82), also graduated in Honours Classics from Victoria College, in...

To speak of ʹtwo portraitsʹ is convenient shorthand for a more complex state of affairs. Chaucer presents Dido in two major passages – one inThe House of Fame(HF), Book 1, the other inThe Legend of Good Women(LGW), no. 3. And while his main source in each case is Virgil (Books 1 and 4 of theAeneid), he does draw at certain points on the reduced and characteristically modified picture given by Ovid in hisHeroides, no. 7. In this analysis we shall proceed chronologically, starting with theAeneid.

To locate our discussion in the right area,...

In comparing the two plays I shall quickly outline theMenaechmi, noting certain features.¹ Then, going on toThe Comedy of Errors, I shall describe how, while retaining important Plautine elements, Shakespeare wove the Latin farce into the framework of a Hellenistic romance, and how in doing so he developed both genres into something richer and more complex, something which reflected contemporary ideas on love and on Christian marriage.

The background of theMenaechmiis supplied in the ingratiatingly jokey prologue.² A father from Syracuse takes one twin to Tarentum and leaves the other at home. At Tarentum, the boy...

As with all imitations, PopeʹsEpistle to Augustusis based on the like and the unlike; and, as with the best of its kind, it possesses a double nature, being both a free-standing poem (English, eighteenth century, and Christian) and also an extended literary allusion, taking off from and returning to its Latin original. In this chapter, after illustrating the English / Roman parallel, I shall mention two opposing views of Augustus. I shall then describe not so much how Horace really felt about him as how he presented him in a given rhetorical context. The same procedure is followed...

Here we are studying a poem without a specific Latin model, but inspired nevertheless by a Latin poet – not by Virgil, whom Tennyson so loved and revered, but by one to whom he was related in a much more intimate and disturbing way, viz. Titus Lucretius Carus. When we come to consider the Victorian poem in detail, we shall have to ask how authentic a picture it gives of Lucretiusʹ mind, and how much is invented and imported by Tennyson himself as a way of externalizing his own inner conflicts. But first we must recall the system on which...

InHomage to Sextus Propertiushow did Pound re-present the Latin poet, specifically in the areas of imperial politics, love, and language? And how far were Poundʹs later statements consistent with this picture? Why hasHomageevoked such conflicting responses? Is it partly because of disagreement about the nature of translation? Such are the questions addressed in this final chapter. A further, more general question has been consigned to an appendix, viz. whether the controversy aboutHomagehas something to do with cultural changes which have taken place since the First World War, in particular the decline of Latin in...