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Late Latin Writers and Greek

PIERRE COURCELLE : Late Latin Writers and their Greek Sources. Translated by Harry E. Wedeck. Pp. xii-f-467. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press (London: Oxford University Press), 1969. Cloth, ^7-25THE first edition of Professor Courcelle's Les Lettres grecques en Occident de Macrobe a Cassiodore appeared in 1943, when the conditions of the time limited its diffusion outside France. A second edition, virtually identical with the first, appeared in 1948, and was at once recognized to be an epoch-making work. In place of a schematic and abstract picture of decadence and decline we were now given a detailed and particular survey of the individuals and groups in the West who maintained contact with Greek culture, of the steady loss of contact during the fifth century, and of a sudden spread of Greek influence under the Ostrogothic Kingdom. The whole argument was supported by an astonishing range of evidence. Courcelle had read everything. And he had the gift of penetrating beyond the smooth rhetorical surface and revealing how much—or how little—men really knew. A Maigret of the Dark Age. The present work is a translation of the second French edition. All that has been added is a brief translator's preface and four pages of supplementary bibliography. What the reader is faced with therefore is the state of the question some thirty years ago. The intervening generation has seen an upsurge of interest in the cultural relations between East and West in late antiquity, largely as a result of the stimulus provided by Courcelle's book. His countryman Marrou is among the first names to spring to mind in this connection. In England Momigliano's work on Cassiodorus, Armstrong's history of late Greek philosophy, P. R. L. Brown's many papers and his book on Augustine all proclaim their debt to Courcelle. In Italy several of the Settimane di Studio sull'Alto Medioevo held annually at Spoleto have been devoted to themes closely linked with those of Courcelle's book, particularly those on 'I Goti in Occidente' (1956), 'II passaggio dall'Antichita al Medioevo' (1962), and 'Centri e vie d'irradiazione della civilta nelFAlto Medioevo' (1962).