The Spectator Classics prize
By Peter Jones The art of Latin and Greek prose and verse composition has been declining over the last 40 years. Very few students do it at all these days. But those properly trained in it tend to be very expert indeed. Consequently, entrants for the editor’s Spectator Classics Cup were relatively easy to divide into sheep and goats, but deciding between the sheep was the very devil.
After much lucubration, I have decided to award the Classics Cup to R. ShawSmith, who won the very first competition with a brilliant interpretation in Ovidian elegiacs of a piece by Petronella Wyatt on a mystery lover who failed to come good (or even, indeed, at all).
However, Shaw-Smith was pushed all the way by Colin Leach, to whom Kerr McGee (North Sea) UK Ltd has generously donated a proxime accessit (it would be proxissime were proximus not already a superlative): a magnificent, leather-bound limited edition of E.V. Rieu’s classic translation of Homer’s Iliad (1950, revised and updated, with new introduction and notes, Penguin Classics, 2003), designed by Iain Bain and published by the Achilles Press (2004).
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