Collected Essays

Colin Macleod died in December 1981 at the age of 38. Many regarded him as already one of the most profound interpreters in our times of Greek and Latin literature and ideas; and it was widely felt that his essays should be collected together in a single volume. There are twenty longer essays, including two previously unpublished, on Homer’s poetics and on Thucydides’ tragic vision, and some dozen shorter pieces. The three most prominent authors are Thucydides, Horace, and Gregory of Nyssa; but Macleod’s extraordinary range included Aeschylus, Catullus, Propertius, and Origen, among many others. He left marginal notes towards any second edition, and these have been collected as an appendix. There is also a list of his many book reviews. This volume has a powerful coherence which comes from Macleod’s fusion of scrupulous scholarship with a passionately intense search for wisdom in the creations of the past. He sees great writers, of prose and verse, as using myth, history, theology, and rhetoric as access to some understanding of the human condition. Careful readers will find that these essays have within them deeply-felt insights into society, love, suffering, and death.