A friend of mine was the copy-editor of the 1963 Rinehart Frost, a bibliographical curiosity because its galleys were the last set of Frost’s poems that he corrected in his own hand and he made several small but significant changes. There was an introduction (as if one were needed) by Robert Graves, who had written it, apparently, in an airplane or someplace where Frost’s poems were not at hand. He referred to the famous Frost line, “Something there is that doesn’t like a wall,” which is, of course, wrong, but she hesitated. Should she silently correct “like” to Frost’s “love,” or leave it as it was because it was interesting that this was how Graves remembered the poem? She decided—correctly I think—to leave it.

The publication of Robert Graves’s Translating Rome raises some of these knotty problems. Graves did the three translations—of The Golden Ass, Pharsalia, and The Twelve Caesars—because he needed the money. In his biography of Graves, Martin Seymour-Smith reports that Graves loved doing the Apuleius, enjoyed the Suetonius, and hated the Lucan. Penguin has updated and corrected the poet’s translation of Suetonius in later editions, with Michael Grant and James Rives making corrections here and there, but . . . why? The old Penguins are reasonably accurate renditions of the texts and quite readable. The Loeb Classical Library version, like all the books in that series, is not designed to be read but rather consulted by someone who is plowing through the original