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In Virgilian terms, Danny is Aeneas, a guy who’s a little too morally scrupulous for his own good.

Reading parts of “Moby-Dick” is like watching a fireworks in which Virgilian Roman candles, Old Testament sparklers, and Shakespearean bottle rockets pop off all at once, hissing and whistling; you get the feeling the stage manager is about to blow a finger off.

In “How the Classics Made Shakespeare,” Jonathan Bate — provost of Worcester College, Oxford, as well as a scholar of remarkable industry — probes what one might call the Ovidian, Virgilian, Horatian, Ciceronian, Plutarchan and Senecan undergirdings to the many Shakespearean works with strong classical associations.

Constable was a realist: English artists before him could not paint a landscape without making it look like Italy, littering it with Virgilian shepherds, cavorting satyrs and comely river gods.

They read like Virgilian eclogues in the age of autocorrect.