How people fabricate their past is a common question in history. It still can come as a surprise when a famous group turns out to have imagined the very thing that has always made them best known. The Messenian helots appear in every course of classical study as the nation enslaved by their Spartan neighbours; Messenia is the oppressed little country whose fate permits students to contrast Spartan militarism so neatly with Athenian virtue. This week Victor Davis Hanson reviews a book which argues that the Messenians of the eighth to fouth centuries bc only became a nation when later generations found it romantic to invent themselves as one. Once their patch of Greece was prosperous it was pleasant to imagine a bad past, to seek special national heritage status and all the benefits that have so often come with it.

The English working-class novelists of the 1950s also found it useful sometimes to touch up their origins – to turn a penny-pinching boyhood with ambitious parents into the squalor of mud and clogs. Alan Sillitoe is the real thing – rising from the tenements of Nottingham to a lasting reputation as a novelist which, as D. J. Taylor describes, is based successfully both on harsh beginnings and the consequences of escaping them.

Sillitoe’s early reading included the ancient authors Tacitus and Sophocles before he moved on to Voltaire and the rules of English metre. In the rest of this issue, which concentrates on new books on the classics, Emily Gowers considers the Latin writer who first put Greek materialist science into the poetry of Rome. The first subject of her review is a new Cambridge Companion to Lucretius. The second is the companion to the De rerum natura that I have enjoyed most myself over the past months, the Penguin rhyming verse translation by the poet, A. E. Stallings, “Lucretius made accessible”, in Gowers’s words, even if not quite reaching “the Lucretian sublime”.

Peter Stothard

Explore The TLS

• TLS Selections

• TLS Archives

• TLS Arguments

• TLS Writers

• TLS Letters

• Poem of the Week

• Then & Now