"Solidly grounded and solidly built...[Highet] deals with every period, every movement, every individual, and every separate work as an interesting special case for which he tries to find the special explanation."
The New Yorker "An excellent outline...[an] intelligent, erudite, perceptive interpretation...a book for the times."
The Nation "It is Highet's appreciate of good literature...which gives a special charm to his book...[It] will ... Read morebe read with gratitude by many."
Times Literary Supplement "Having reread Gilbert Highet's The Classical Tradition, I am once again under its spell. The book, like Curtius' European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, is a monument to a certain moment of mid-20th-century classicism, deeply humane, fundamentally conservative, committed to putting back together what seemed like the shattered pieces of Western civilization in the wake of Nazi barbarism. It is its vast scope, its capacious overview, that gives it its power."
Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard University "More than sixty years after Gilbert Highet's book first appeared, it remains the best single guide to the whole afterlife of Greek and Latin literature. The Classical Tradition does full justice to the complexity of this millenial story: Highet shows us both how ancient books shaped later readers, and how medieval and modern writers used classical elements to build their own, distinctive literatures. Learned, epigrammatic, and humanely opinionated, Highet's book is as readable as it is comprehensive."
Anthony Grafton, Princeton University Show Less