PREFACE
SO VARIED AND SPECIALIZED IS THE VOLUME OF knowledge which modern man requires for understanding himself and his world that no one could reasonably desire classical education to be restored to the primacy it held up to two generations ago.

I
THE NATURE OF LATIN LITERATURE
THE LATIN LITERATURE WHICH WE ARE ABOUT TO consider represents the choicest thought and expression of Europe during several critical and seminal centuries of its history, and up to the present it has been regarded, along with the Greek which nourished it, as the backbone of European education.