Though Shakespeare could read Ovid in Latin, he echoes as often the Englished Ovid of Golding.

He described with the art of a sculptor; he satirized, laughed, prayed, sighed, always elegant, always a Florentine, but a Florentine who read Anacreon, Ovid and Tibullus, who wished to enjoy life, but also to taste of the refinements of art.

When Mr. Brodsky asked how many had read Ovid, not a single hand went up.

"In terms of being able to read Virgil or Ovid, it's not going to get you there," Mr. Burgess said.

If I thought you could even read Ovid to me in the evenings, Id buy you in a moment.

Latin students read Ovid and Cicero in the original; English classes cover Dante, V. S. Naipaul, Milan Kundera, Dostoyevsky and Graham Greene.

But it transpires that Campanu is a fiction: a fully imagined other writer, known to McGuinness as "a late middle-aged heavy-smoking Romanian with big sad eyes and a penchant for reading Ovid".

Next year they will read Ovid.

It's a whole new world out there at Hudson High and oodles more fun, I gather, than it was when Jack Armstrong and I were reading Ovid when the Latin teacher was looking and "Spicy Detective" when he wasn't.

"When I read Cicero and Ovid and Lucretius, it seemed so to me."