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.