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.

Having recounted the reigns of Croesus and Cyrus, in book 2 the narrator turns to the third of the five oriental rulers that form the chronological backbone of his Histories: Cambyses, the son of Cyrus and Cassandane. We hear two things about him: (i) Cambyses considers (μέν) the Ionians and Aeolians ‘slaves inherited from his father’, which reminds us of Herodotus’ central theme of the confrontation between barbarians and Greeks; cf. the introduction of Croesus as the man who was the first to subject the Ionians, Aeolians, and Dorians in Asia (1.6.2), and of Cyrus as the one who, by defeating Croesus, made the Persians masters of all Asia (1.95.1). Later the narrator will specify that Cambyses takes Ionians and Aeolians with him on his expedition against Egypt (3.1.1). (ii) Cambyses undertakes (δέ) an expedition against Egypt; a *structural imperfect (ἐποιέετο στρατηλασίην: 2.1.2) is used, since the narrator first inserts a massive geographic (5–34) and ethnographic (35–98) description and a history (99–182) of Egypt before starting his narrative of Cambyses’ expedition in 3.1.1.

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.

1–11 The narrator switches, with μέν–δέ, from the Spartan envoys marching away from Athens (cf. 8.144.5) to Mardonius in Thessaly; the non-Herodotean book-division disguises the connection. Exactly as the Athenians had foreseen, Mardonius, when hearing that the Athenians refuse his offer of an alliance, sets out for Athens.

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.

1–26 Cambyses was briefly introduced by the narrator in 2.1.1 but right away disappeared from the scene in favour of the long geographical, ethnographic, and historical introduction of the object of his military expedition, Egypt, which ended with the rule of Amasis. The narrator now picks up his narrative thread again: ‘against this Amasis Cambyses the son of Cyrus launched an expedition’. He again (cf. 2.1.2) explicitly mentions that there were Ionians and Aeolians in the army Cambyses takes with him against Egypt; they will play a minor role in 3.11 and 25.7. The attention paid to their (negligible) presence serves to prepare for the much more important role played by Ionians in the expeditions of Darius against the Scythians (when they build and guard a bridge over the Ister for him: 4.97–8, 133–42) and of Xerxes against the mainland Greeks (when they fight on the Persian side at Salamis: 8.85, 90).

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?

1–22 The narrator resumes the main thread of his narrative after the Libyan logos of 4.145–205. Having taken his leave of the Persian general Megabazus while the latter was subduing (imperfect κατεστρέφετο) ‘those people of the Hellespont who did not take the side of the Persians’ (4.144.3), he now recounts how the Persians led by Megabazus subdue (aorist κατεστρέψαντο) the Perinthians (1–2), the coastal Thracians (3–10), and (part of) the Paeonians, another Thracian tribe (12–6), while their last target, the Macedonians, medize, though not without some form of resistance by the youthful prince Alexander (17–22).