The Love of Nature among the Romans during the Later Decades of the Republic and the First Century of the Empire

Abstract

This is indeed a delightful book, full of contagious zest and charm. The love of nature, the love of science, the love of the best literature both of the past and the present, all combine to make it so. It represents the happy adventure of one of our very foremost men of science, the President of the Royal Society, and the doyen of British geology, into the realm of classical scholarship and Roman literature. The “classics,” as they ire commonly called among those who love them and write about them, suffer too often by being made a business of. The affection of the schoolmaster or the classical professor is discounted as being professional, and its sincerity is a little doubted. It is only when some old statesman or soldier, some lawyer or physician, some original modern poet who has made his own name, after experience of the world, turns again, as Cardinal Newman in the famous passage in the Grammar of Assent describes him doing, to the Homer or Horace of his schoolboy hours, that we feel that the classics are being taken at their real value and that their natural undying charm is once more powerfully vindicated.

The Love of Nature among the Romans during the Later Decades of the Republic and the First Century of the Empire.

Sir A. Geikie, K.C.B., F.R.S. Pp. xi + 394. (London: John Murray, 1912) Price 9s. net.