Latin Literature

is an instance of the amazing mastery with which he makes language have the effect of music in expressing the subtlest processes of feeling. But the specific and central charm o...

The two other epic poets contemporary with Statius whose works are extant, Valerius Flaccus and Silius Italicus, belong generally to the same school, but stand on a much lower l...

With the publication of the three books of the _Odes,_ and the first book of the _Epistles,_ Horace's finest and maturest work was complete. In the twelve years of his life whic...

Contemporary with Lucretius, but, unlike him, living in the full whirl and glare of Roman life, was a group of young men who were professed followers of the Alexandrian school....

In a fine passage at the opening of the fifth book of his _Institutes of Divinity,_ Lactantius regrets the imperfect literary support given to Christianity by his two eminent pr...

For the metre of the _Metamorphoses_ Ovid chose the heroic hexameter, but used it in a strikingly new and original way. He makes no attempt, as later poets unsuccessfully did, a...

Virgil's father was a small freeholder in Andes, who farmed his own land, practised forestry and bee-keeping, and gradually accumulated a sufficient competence to enable him to...

One of Lucan's intimate friends was a young man of high family, Aulus Persius Flaccus of Volaterrae in Etruria, a near relation of the celebrated Arria, wife of Paetus. Through...

With Prudentius, however, as with Claudian, we have almost passed beyond the strict limit of a history of ancient Latin literature: and any fuller discussion, either of these re...

In history as in poetry, the first steps were timidly made with the help of Greek models. The oldest and most important of the early historians, Quintus Fabius Pictor, the conte...

It is, indeed, in Quintilian that the reaction from the early imperial manner comes to its climax. Statius had, to a certain degree, gone back to Virgil; Quintilian goes back to...

Caesar's assassination on the 15th of March, 44 B.C., plunged the political situation into a worse chaos than had ever been reached during the Civil wars. For several months it...

Such is one view now taken of the early Roman Empire. Its weakness is that it explains too much. How or why, if the matter was really as simple as this, did the traditional lege...

"They say that our father Jupiter, when he ordered the world at the beginning, divided time into two parts exactly equal; the one part he clothed with light, the other with dark...

A history of Latin Literature was to have been written for this series of Manuals by the late Professor William Sellar. After his death I was asked, as one of his old pupils, to...

In these lines, hardly to be read without tears, Propertius for once rises into that clear air in which art passes beyond the reach of criticism. What he might have done in this...

As this latter form of Latin comedy has perished, with the exception of trifling fragments, it may be dismissed here in few words. Its life was comprised in less than a century....

Oratory at Rome had, as we have already seen, attained a high degree of perfection when Cicero entered on public life. Its golden age was indeed, in the estimation of some criti...

Brief and straightforward as the sentence is, every clause in it has given rise to volumes of controversy. Was Lucretius born in the year named, or is another tradition correct,...

The study of archaeology, both on its linguistic and material sides, was carried on in the Augustan age with great vigour, though no single name is comparable to that of Varro f...

The cult of Ciceronianism established by Quintilian is the real origin of the collection of Pliny's _Letters_. Cicero and Pliny had many weaknesses and some virtues in common, a...

As a master of style, Livy is in the first rank of historians. He marks the highest point which the enlarged and enriched prose of the Augustan age reached just before it began...

Beyond the field of law, such prose as was written in this century was mainly Greek. The historical works of Herodian and Dio Cassius, poor in quality as they are, seem to have...

For the Catholic Church now became the centre of European cohesion, and gave continuity and common life to the scattered remains of the ancient civilisation. Already, in the fif...