In George Santayana’s memoir People and Places he has this to say about his father:
As to the Romans, I am uncertain of his feelings. He often quoted them as great authorities, especially the line of Lucretius about Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.
This is the most-famed line in all of Lucretius, book I. 101, the moral which the poet takes away from the tale of the slaughter of Iphianassa (i.e. Iphigeneia). In Bailey’s words: “Such evil deeds could religion prompt.” One is reminded of the oft-quoted line by physicist Steven Weinberg, viz. “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion.” I wouldn’t doubt that Lucretius planted the seed of this later thought, and though Weinberg has been much maligned and criticized for the remark (especially as concerns the irreligion of those behind many modern societal atrocities), there’s something lost in the translation. Fascism, Stalinism, etc., all had a great deal of religio about them even if they opposed or rejected any or all religion, and it was religio in the form of nationalism that made the Holocaust possible.
But It was the thought, the political wisdom in them, that he cared for. He took their Greek refinements, as the true Romans took them, for mere accessories and matters of fashion. When I once wrote out for him (he had few books) the well-known little ode to Pyrrha in the first book of Horace, he was arrested at the word uvida, and remarked on the interweaving of the concordance between adjectives and nouns.
I’m always impressed by the way older generations of non-specialists read classical literature, and continually find those who are more sophisticated, more sensitive to aesthetics, and more well-versed in the literature than many today. I’m frankly in awe of the elder Santayana’s ability to be “arrested” in such a fashion, and to have felt and understood the effect of the word placement. Wouldn’t we all love to have such a sensitivity to the sounds and effects of Latin poetry that “… uvida (A) / suspendisse potenti (B) / vestimenta (A) maris deo (B)” worked such magic as it seems to have here?
I still don’t believe we’re helping students get there by spending three or four years on artificial narratives about ‘daily life,’ then reading the simplest bits of Catullus with reams of notes, and treating it like juicy gossip. But how do we get students to a genuine love or lifetime appreciation of this stuff if it’s already been lost for most of us?