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.