Not to say that it is childlike, but Richard Jenkyns's new book offers so fresh and enchanted an overview of Classical Literature that one could be forgiven for thinking that he has only just stumbled upon it like a schoolboy. Jenkyns is, in fact, an eminent Professor of Classics at Oxford. His book is lively, combining authority with a readily discernible awe for the wonders of the ancient world. It is an excellent blueprint for what Classicists must do if they are to keep their subject alive today by making it appeal to a fresh audience.

As he moves chronologically down the centuries of literature, from Homer and Hesiod to the Latin writers of the early second century AD, Jenkyns delights in the fine details. Achilles is an unexpected aesthete, he reminds us, the only musician in Homer's Iliad to be shown rehearsing songs. Elegy was never just intended for poetry; the Athenian statesman Solon employed it for his political statements in the sixth century BC. In the same period, an elegist named Xenophanes noted wryly that the Germans' gods must be blond, because the Germans were blond. By the same logic, he followed, if horses had gods, their gods would naturally be horses.

Jenkyns is quick to point out firsts: the first association of sex with death, in a seventh-century BC Spartan poem; the first attempt to give an accurate representation of childhood in Xenophon's Education of Cyrus, a biography of the Persian king; the first playwright—Sophocles—to use three actors on stage at once.

His tastes are for fast and dramatic episodes. He seeks drama in practically everything. Xenophon's portrait of King Cyrus is, as far as he is concerned, rather flat because, "truth to tell, the boy Cyrus is too purely virtuous for the depiction to get far, and the adult Cyrus is so perfect a pattern of kingship that he cannot interest us much." Ovid's Metamorphoses, one of the most influential Latin poems ever written, "can be overrated", because, in Jenkyns's view, his passages of natural description lack imagination, and there is less variety of tone than there might have been. In truth, Ovid's descriptions of nature, all weathered rocks, crumbling arches, and streams which ripple with sexual tension, seem to me to be rather more imaginative than Jenkyns remembers.
 
Not everyone will share Jenkyns's likes and dislikes. I, for one, rather enjoy finding the more mundane details in ancient history books. On a dull day of errands, it is comforting to be reminded that life wasn't just one great flurry of adventure then, either. I found Jenkyns a likeable guide nonetheless.