No expiration date on genius

ONE of the funniest smaller moments in Louis de Bernieres’ novel “Corelli’s Mandolin” happens when a British spy meets the locals on wartime Cephalonia, a Greek island occupied by Nazi and Italian forces. The only Greek words the operative knows are the ancient variety, and when he tries to communicate with the villagers, they can’t understand him. De Bernieres suggests how strange he sounds by rendering his speech in Chaucerian English.

The ancient bards, the scene suggests, are out of place in the modern world, their language too stilted and gilded to be of any use. But “A Loeb Classical Library Reader” begs us to reconsider, begs us in the same way Homer begged for inspiration from the muses. Here are 12 centuries packed into 234 bilingual pages: Short passages extracted from all those exquisite little red and green hardbacks that only a scholar -- or an interior designer with bookshelves to fill -- ever used or needed.

Until now.

Ignore the bad rap the ancients might get from traumatized former high school Greek and Latin students. Jump in. Feel the shift in energy and tone from Aristophanes on sex to Xenophon on stranded mercenaries in Babylon. It’s a little like reading the sexual encounter with a piece of liver from Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint” followed by a page from David McCullough’s biography of John Adams. It’s that same abrupt change between subjects and voices, a sense of diversity and velocity that is everywhere in this book.

Juvenal comes across as the Greco-Roman Tom Wolfe, his picture of perilous Roman city life -- “How often cracked and leaky pots tumble down from the windows!” -- echoing the harsher precincts of New York City in “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” Julius Caesar’s decision to build a bridge across the Rhine -- it was “unworthy of his and the Roman’s dignity, to cross in boats” -- would make anyone caught in traffic wish for an escape built of Gallic timber. Pliny the Elder, who died at Mt. Vesuvius in AD 79 when he wanted to study an eruption up close, prefigures our risk-taking news correspondents in the field.

Women are omnipresent, though not as authors (Sappho, anyone?). “Cynthia first with her eyes ensnared me, poor wretch,” writes the glorious, love-troubled Propertius. Hesiod, on the other hand, blames all the world’s ills on Pandora, who has the “beautiful, lovely form of a maiden ... and guileful words and a thievish character.”

Few have time to idle in this world anymore. Even though Western culture is rooted in the classics, fluency in them means nothing next to fluency in the latest business software. But if the sampling and lengths are done right, and the translations are simple and direct, an anthology keeps the Great Ones alive and relevant. Thanks to this collection, they don’t seem so far away.