Noblest of Romans
From John Jenkins
Sir: I cannot allow Paul Johnson’s assertions about the poverty of Latin literature to remain unanswered (And another thing, 11 November). It is true that Latin literature produced no one like Homer or Plato. Indeed the Greeks produced only one of each. But it produced Virgil, whom Dante certainly regarded highly (as do I, unlike Johnson). Virgil has influenced many subsequent authors from Milton to Philip Pullman. As for others, I seem to recall W.H. Auden once saying that in his old age he had turned to Horace. That is good testimony. Ovid is magnificent — and the model of a poet for 1,500 years. The Tristia and Ex Ponto are, I think, the first poems of artistic resistance to power in the European tradition. True, Thucydides wrote of the tragedy of Athens, but Tacitus gives us the brutal reality of imperial Rome. Both work for me. Petronius and Apuleius produced far better proto-novels than the sentimental Greeks. And if Aristotle was the great systematiser of the ancient world, Aquinas was so for the high Middle Ages.
Incidentally, I doubt very much that St Paul quoted Cicero. Paul was a Greekspeaking Jew. He is unlikely to have been familiar with 1st-century BC Latin rhetoricians, even one as distinguished as Cicero. And he would by choice have spoken Greek or Aramaic.
John Jenkins
HM Consul General, Jerusalem, Israel
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