ABOUT THE AUTHOR...

JOHN NELSON DAVIE

My interest in writing Latin verse stems from my own career as a teacher of Classics. After graduating from Glasgow University with First Class Honours in 1972, I went to Balliol College Oxford as a Snell Exhibitioner, where I wrote a thesis on Greek Tragedy, graduating B.Litt. in 1975. I then taught at Harrow School before moving nine years later to become Head of Classics at St. Paul's School, where I remained until retirement in 2010. For the last twenty years I have taught students part-time at various Oxford colleges, mainly Balliol and Trinity, as a college lecturer in Classics. 

My interest in writing Latin verse grew out of my teaching Latin prose composition for many years, and also from being a great fan of the master of Latin elegiac verse, the love poet, Ovid. I enjoy the discipline of keeping to the framework of the elegiac couplet as practised by the Roman poets under the emperor Augustus, 2,000 years ago, and 500 years before them, the poets of ancient Greece. The most famous example is probably the couplet written in honour of the dead Spartans at Thermopylae by the poet Simonides, which reads in translation:

'Bear news to Sparta, stranger passing by,

That here, obedient to her laws, we lie'.

Epitaphs for dead friends were always composed in this metre, and also for dead pets, and the practice continued throughout Europe from the Renaissance onwards. My own experience of finding a Victorian example in Chiswick Park, the primary motivation for me to attempt this art form myself, illustrates this.