Latin Literature

V

The Golden Age: Poetry

The forerunner of the greatest age of Roman poetry was Lucretius, whose didactic poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) argues in eloquent hexameter verse that the gods do not intervene in human affairs. Catullus, the first great lyric poet in Latin, was inspired by Greek models. His longer poems are complex and learned, but more characteristic of him are the shorter lyrics, some of them pure and simple utterances of his love for a woman called Lesbia and for his dead brother, others characterized by the sharp and mordant wit of his invective directed against his personal enemies. His intense, earnest voice has been a moving force in the history of the European lyric since the rediscovery of his work in the early Renaissance.

Acknowledged the greatest of all Latin poets, in his own as well as in later times, was Virgil. Early in his career he wrote the Eclogues, ten elegant and moving pastoral poems that became lasting models of their kind. These were followed by his graceful poem on farm life, the Georgics. Virgil’s masterpiece, however, was the Aeneid, an epic poem telling how the Trojan hero Aeneas came to Italy to found the settlement out of which Rome arose. In this complex work, in which the heroic world of Homer is recast as the backdrop for the founding of Rome, the sufferings of Aeneas mute the patriotic grandeur of the theme. Each succeeding age has found in the Aeneid a message applicable to its own concerns.

The lyric tradition was continued by a galaxy of poets who are still read. Virgil’s friend Horace made himself the master of the ode, skillfully adapting Greek meters into Latin in the service of his own graceful voice. His best poetry is informed with a spirit of detached amusement. The tradition of the love elegy, begun by Catullus, was continued in a gentle and wistful manner by Albius Tibullus. The last of the three books of poems attributed to him includes direct and affecting poems on love. These poems were actually written by his contemporary Sulpicia, however, and are the only poems extant by a Roman woman.

Sextus Propertius wrote more dynamic and complex love elegies, turbulent and restless records of his difficult affair with Cynthia. The elegiac tradition was concluded by the work of Ovid, who treated the form in a playful manner. A voluminous poet, Ovid is best known for his Ars Amatoria, an ironic handbook on love, and his greatest work, the Metamorphoses, a long, loosely woven epic retelling ancient myths in graceful and melancholy tones.

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VI

The Golden Age: Prose

Corresponding to the Golden Age of Roman poetry was an age of equal achievement in prose. The leading figure was Cicero, a statesman and orator whose resonant and sonorous rhetoric became the model for later European oratory. The best known of Cicero’s speeches are the vehement orations against the political conspirator Catiline, but many others are equally effective in the consummate care with which the rhythms and cadences of the Latin language are orchestrated to achieve spectacular rhetorical effects. Cicero excelled as well in prose works of a more relaxed style, including treatises on rhetoric and philosophical works such as the famous pieces on friendship and on old age. Much of his extensive and revealing correspondence also exists.

Equally well known as a prose writer was Cicero’s contemporary Gaius Julius Caesar. His clear and forceful commentaries on the Gallic and civil wars of the 50s and 40s (De Bello Gallico and De Bello Civili) have also become models of their kind, known to generations of beginning Latin students. The outstanding Roman historian was Livy, who wrote a lengthy history of Rome, Ab Urbe Condita Libri (From the Founding of the City), only about a fourth of which survives. It still serves as a basic source for the period.

VII

The Silver Age

The Golden Age was followed by what is often called the Silver Age of Latin literature, in the 1st century ad. Although it was overshadowed by the brilliance of the preceding century, a substantial body of accomplished work was produced during this time. Virgil exploited the epic genre so fully that subsequent epic poets were more hampered than helped by his example. Effective use of the epic tradition, however, was made by Lucan, whose Pharsalia treats the conflict between Caesar and Pompey the Great in the Roman civil war (49-45 BC), and by Publius Papinius Statius, a writer much admired in the Middle Ages. The Thebais (91?), Statius’s major work, is an energetic and loosely organized epic that pushes each feature of Virgilian style to its extreme. A dominant figure of the silver age was Seneca, the tutor of the notorious emperor Nero. Seneca expounded the doctrines of the Stoic philosophy in letters and treatises that had great influence, and he wrote nine grisly tragedies that over the centuries have thrilled and horrified European dramatic sensibilities.

Interesting work was done in the mid-1st century in various satiric modes. The slave Phaedrus, who became a freeman under the emperor Augustus, produced Latin verse versions of the popular fables of the Greek writer Aesop. Perhaps the most original writer of his time was the urbane Petronius Arbiter, whose astonishing Satyricon (60?), a vast work in verse and prose of which only a part is extant, is a powerfully entertaining narrative vividly depicting a wide range of human excess. Vivid writing is a feature also of the great writers of verse satire, the harsh and difficult Persius and the bitter and cynical—but entertaining—Juvenal. That shortest of poetic forms, the epigram, was perfected by Martial, whose witty and frequently obscene verses are models for their genre.

The prose of the 1st century ad includes the works of a number of noteworthy didactic writers. Pliny the Elder was a prolific writer whose Historia Naturalis remained a standard encyclopedic natural history textbook for generations. The Institutio oratoria (95?) of the rhetorician Quintilian is an equally authoritative study; devoted to the theory and practice of oratory, it includes some of the most judicious Roman literary criticism. Several outstanding historians also wrote during this period. Cornelius Tacitus dramatically narrated the events of his own generation and the one preceding it in his Historiae (104-109) and Annales (115?-117?). He also wrote a famous description of Germany and its inhabitants, Germania (98?). De Vita Caesarum (121?), by Suetonius, is famous for its animated biographies of the Caesars and its often lurid depiction of what is for modern readers the most sensational period of Roman history.

VIII

Late Period

During the subsequent centuries of the Roman Empire, literature declined along with the political fortunes of the empire, but a few important figures emerged. The Metamorphoses (often called in translation The Golden Ass) of Lucius Apuleius is an entertaining prose narrative that includes the elegantly recounted story of Cupid and Psyche. A final burst of pagan literary energy occurred in the 4th century, with the learned and discerning Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius producing a sort of summary of ancient culture in his Saturnalia near the end of the century.

IX

Early Christian Writing

The first period of Christian literature in Latin overlaps that of later pagan writing. The first important Christian writer was Tertullian, a master of prose. One of the most influential Christian writers of his time was the church father Saint Ambrose, whose correspondence is still read with interest, and who is also important for his hymns. A new tradition of Christian poetry, using pagan literary devices for Christian purposes, was inaugurated in the 4th century by Aurelius Clemens Prudentius, whose Psychomachia (Battle of the Soul) pioneered the use of allegory in Christian poetry.

Two church fathers dominate early Christian prose: Saint Jerome and Saint Augustine. The major accomplishment of Saint Jerome was his translation of the Bible. Known as the Vulgate, it has been the standard Latin version ever since, and its influence on subsequent Latin—and European—prose was enormous. Saint Augustine was one of the most influential of all European thinkers. His major works, De Civitate Dei (The City of God, 413-426) and the highly personal Confessions (400?), use the classic style of Ciceronian rhetoric in an individual and moving way to express a sense of Christian conviction. Other products of this age, not specifically Christian in their orientation, had an immense influence on subsequent Christian thought. De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, 400?) is the title popularly given to a curious allegorical work by Martianus Minneus Felix Capella; it provided a way for European Christian culture to organize the secular knowledge it considered worthwhile. De Consolatione Philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy), by the consul Boethius, calmly and masterfully depicts the way in which the life of the mind can be a source of inner peace in harrowing times.

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