Clearly this has been a labour of love – Christopher Childers spent over a decade on this tome – or maybe even a love of labour. That anyone would even attempt to sit down and translate a significant chunk of all Greek or Latin lyric poetry, and cram both the Greek and Latin poems into one volume is, let’s face it, a little daft. But it is an inspired and enlightening lunacy. It is rare to be able to say, as a reviewer, here is a work of staggering ambition, exceptional accomplishment, and surprisingly pleasant reading, but here we are.

We live in an age of critical hyberbole, but it is nearly impossible to overstate the contribution to world letters Christopher Childers has made with his anthology of Greek and Latin lyric verse. He has translated it all, and it all bears the mark of his unique poetic intelligence—formally expert, and tonally at home with poems of lament, blessing, curse, wit, and even laugh-aloud humor. He has worked with an unerring diversity of approaches and meters, honoring in his living English the likely intentions of individual long-dead poets who emerge as speaking to their own time, but also ours. Even in the darkest lyrics, we feel pure delight in both the poet’s and the translator’s success. The great majority of readers are not Classicists, and for us it is not only the poems but Childers’s highly accessible introductory matter—prosodic, linguistic, biographical, historical—that makes this anthology a treasure. I will be reading it and re-reading it, I know, for the rest of my life.

‘An extraordnary feat … I loved the liveliness of Childers’s use of multiple different verse forms, and management of meter and rhyme … Childers is particularly good with comic and semi-comic poes — Catullus, Anacreon, Martial, etc. — but he also rises to the challenge of making the complex lyrical leaps of Pindar and Bacchylides feel sonically alive. Over and over, I was impressed both by Childers’s technical abilities and his vivid way of evoking the multiple voices in this rich tradition.’

‘This is an extraordinary achievement, in scope, scale and skill. I hope that it will make a splash, as it deserves to.’

This book is amazing. I've been reading in it with gratitude and awe. The intro and translator's note and lovely essay on lyric by Glenn Most, and of course the terrifically accomplished translations: it’s a lifetime achievement, a laurel worthy of resting on. This book is the real deal.