"The life-work of Sir Maurice Bowra, Warden of Wadham College for over thirty years, and Oxford Professor of Poetry, was to rediscover and re-create the history and literature of the Ancient Classical world. Though he became a scholar of international standing, he was never a pure scholar in the strict sense. He does not belong to the crystalline limbo of Scaliger or Bentley or Housman. His purpose was missionary: to reconvert a modern audience and readership for whom the urbane tradition of classical learning—in fact the whole august zodiac of classical reference—has come to seem deeply alien, if not actually menacing in its humped posture of intellectual introversion. But the whole tenor of Bowra's writing was extrovert."