The book’s Part II begins by exploring conversations with antiquity made possible by different kinds of parallel Latin and vernacular composition in early modern poetry. Some of Andrew Marvell’s verse is in Latin, and of particular interest are instances in which Marvell writes Latin and English versions of the same poem: thus Hortus and the more famous Garden read as cross-referential poems that play with, and thematize, the writer’s dual literary competence in English and in Latin. This kind of ‘diptych’ composition is rendered more fully tangible in John Milton’s 1645 double book Poems, both English and Latin, ahead in Chapter 5. However, the midsection of Chapter 4 takes the idea of the cross-linguistic diptych in a different and hypothetical direction: what if one were to imagine a Latin ‘twin’ for every vernacular poem steeped in classical tradition, even in the 99 per cent of cases in which no such twin exists? Such a thought experiment finds special traction in the case of Milton’s Paradise Lost, with an added twist in that early translators were not lacking who actually rendered the Latinate and Virgilian verse of Paradise Lost into post-Virgilian Latin.

The book’s second chapter offers some up-close treatments of negotiation between Latin and Greek in epic proems, at points of heuristic intersection between allusion, translation, and character-by-character transliteration. As the enterprise of Romanizing the Greek epic project gets under way, how does the beginning of a Latin epic negotiate its cross-linguistic turn? The chapter mobilizes the idea of poetic ‘transliteralism’, and does so partly by touching upon the world of digital text analysis, with its interest in harnessing translation technologies to achieve meaningful digital text-matching of Latin and Greek. Discussion moves from the very first verse in Roman epic tradition, the start of Livius Andronicus’ version of the Odyssey, to the opening (and closing) lines of the Ilias Latina, the probably Neronian epitome that served for the western Middle Ages as a make-do surrogate for the Iliad. In between, the ‘transliteral’ approach is applied to more familiar Homerizing setups by Virgil and by Statius; and the chapter also addresses a recurrent point of reference for the translingual poetics of Greek into Latin, the Phaenomena of Aratus.

The Conclusion begins by setting the poetic bilingualisms treated in this book alongside the kinds of everyday bilingualism overheard on the streets of any city, from antiquity to the present day, in which two or more cultures meet, clash, and coalesce. There too, inequalities of language status will often be in play; but the inequalities explored here are negotiated in a distinctive way across time, and between ‘older’ and ‘younger’ literary languages or codes. Issues of education and of access to the so-called learned tongues are reviewed; attention is drawn to the sometimes oppressive effect of the word ‘the’ in monolithic master narratives of ‘the’ classical tradition. In retrospect, the book is argued to have been less about achieved classicism than about classicism as process, about a plurality of classical traditions generated anew by every cross-linguistic and transcultural event mobilized by every poet and every reader. Things end with a closural – but also open-ended – catalogue of some of the book’s recurrent questions, preoccupations, themes, and tropes.

Introduction: Interpreters of Paul have distorted or misconstrued features of Paul’s notion of love by insisting that he holds to an absolute antithesis between self-interest and other-regard. This calls for a rereading of Paul’s Christology and love ethics beyond that dichotomy.

The treatment here of a major Romantic poet, William Wordsworth, takes its initial and final bearings not from any composition in Latin but from the poet’s English translations from Latin: his abandoned late career Aeneid, and early versions of lines from the Georgics in his student sketchbooks. In between, two mid-career lyric narratives are discussed. Throughout, the kind of verbal push-and-pull that is a common element in all this book’s studies finds a new immediacy through privileged access to the ebb and flow of Wordsworth’s transactions with the classical in his own successive redrafts and re-edits, and in the commentatorial interventions of his friends and family (including Coleridge’s minute and unsparing marginalia on the attempted Aeneid). The middle of the chapter explores the Laodamia, whose up-close Virgilianism is obsessively worked and reworked over a thirty-year period, and then the Dion, another oddly framed lyric narrative that originates in Plutarch as an exemplary Greek ‘life’ parallel to that of the Roman Brutus. Trace elements of Wordsworth’s distinctively autobiographical poetic of lake and landscape are everywhere in play, sometimes unexpectedly.

Pastoral has some claims to be the genre of classical tradition and, after antiquity, the genre that most persistently tropes classical tradition itself as a genre. At one level, post-antique pastoral will always transcend the (already manoeuvrable) ancient limits of the genre, expanding into the magical rural space of ‘paganism’ at large, or unlocking allegories that render prelate or ruler – or poet – as a Davidian or Christ-like ‘good shepherd’. Yet the pastoral poem will always allow its transcultural conversations to revert once more to the first linguistic principles of a Virgilian Eclogue – at times literally, word by word. Different worlds of early modern ‘pastoral philology’ are sampled here in the Bucolicum carmen of Petrarch, in the Latin eclogues of Baptista Mantuan, and in the English Shepheardes Calender of Spenser. And all three poets are found to draw from the Virgil of the Fourth (‘messianic’) Eclogue some kind of interest in a pastorally inflected salvation, whether temporal, spiritual, or both at once. The chapter ends with three eclogues by Seamus Heaney, a poet of our own time with a deep understanding of the ‘staying power’ of pastoral.

Itineraries of poetry across language boundaries do not necessarily entail actual travel on the poet’s part. However, writers ancient and modern did go on excursions to the lands associated with the poetic traditions with which they interacted – as did readers too. Chapter 5 resumes discussion of two poets who appeared in Chapter 4, Joachim Du Bellay in sixteenth-century France (via the French Antiquitez de Rome, the Latin Elegiae, and other works) and John Milton in seventeenth-century England (via the bilingual double book of 1645, its Latin half framed by dedicatory testimonia from learned Italians and by the career-punctuating Epitaph for Damon). For both, language choice would have been an issue even without their ventures abroad; but both use their time in Italy to explore, sharpen, thematize, and problematize transcultural issues of language and identity. Is the passage to Italy a celebration of linguistic cosmopolitanism or a test of linguistic loyalty, a journey home or a journey into exile and alienation? What kinds of language question do poetic travellers to Italy negotiate, and what Rome, or whose Rome, do they find?

Given everything that we know about Latin literature as an outgrowth from Greek, about the persistent habit of Roman poets of fashioning their works as always and pervasively in dialogue with Greek, and more generally about the grounding of Roman elite education in Greek, shouldn’t we reasonably expect some actual surviving poetry in Greek from our canonical Latin poets? With just enough interesting exceptions to prove the rule, such poetry is conspicuous by its absence. In early modernity, in contrast, an analogously deep and learned engagement with an older literary and linguistic tradition (in this case Latin, now in the ‘Greek’ role), coinciding with the development of newer vernacular possibilities, leads to a situation in which poetic publication is possible either in the newer language or in the older one, or sometimes in both at the same time. If (say) Petrarch or Milton can have a bilingual poetic oeuvre, why not Virgil or Ovid? The chapter offers some close-up exploration of this ‘blind spot’ in ancient intertextual behaviour before taking a look at one late, partial, and spectacular exception, involving the fourth-century CE poet Ausonius.