Gideon Nisbet

Snapshots of an ancient world that was just like ours: replete with tourists, showoffs, and those torn up by love and grief. I’ll be honest: some of the most affecting of these are the pederastic ones; but there are excellent hetero sex and love poems here too. I also loved the dedicatory epigrams, through which tools praise the craftsmen who made or wielded them, and the epitaphs. Many of these are prefatory to, or otherwise hint at, lost works — another way in which the book opens its milieu to the modern reader. And it’s copiously rude, satirical, lowbrow.

Nisbet’s translations into iambic pentameter are generally very fluent. He’s also a terrific annotator, going above and beyond in the introduction and, especially, the endnotes to really contextualise these condensed droplets of ancient human existence.… (more)