Latin literature, the body of writings in Latin, primarily produced during the Roman

Republic and the Roman Empire, when Latin was a spoken language. When Rome fell, Latin
remained the literary language of the Western medieval world until it was superseded by
the Romance languages it had generated and by other modern languages. After the Renaissance
the writing of Latin was increasingly confined to the narrow limits of certain ecclesiastical and
academic publications. This article focuses primarily on ancient Latin literature. It does,
however, provide a broad overview of the literary works produced in Latin by European writers
during the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Ancient Latin Literature

Literature in Latin began as translation from the Greek, a fact that conditioned its development.
Latin authors used earlier writers as sources of stock themes and motifs, at their best using their
relationship to tradition to produce a new species of originality. They were more distinguished as
verbal artists than as thinkers; the finest of them have a superb command of concrete detail and
vivid illustration. Their noblest ideal was humanitas, a blend of culture and kindliness,
approximating the quality of being “civilized.”

Little need be said of the preliterary period. Hellenistic influence came from the south, Etrusco-
Hellenic from the north. Improvised farce, with stock characters in masks, may have been a
native invention from the Campania region (the countryside of modern Naples). The
historian Livy traced quasi-dramatic satura (medley) to the Etruscans. The statesman-writer Cato
and the scholar Varro said that in former times the praises of heroes were sung after feasts,
sometimes to the accompaniment of the flute, which was perhaps an Etruscan custom. If they
existed, these carmina convivalia, or festal songs, would be behind some of the legends that
came down to Livy. There were also the rude verses improvised at harvest festivals and
weddings and liturgical formulas, whose scanty remains show alliteration and assonance. The
nearest approach to literature must have been in public and private records and in recorded
speeches.

Stylistic periods

Ancient Latin literature may be divided into four periods: early writers, to 70 BC; Golden Age,
70 BC–AD 18; Silver Age, AD 18–133; and later writers.

Early writers

The ground for Roman literature was prepared by an influx from the early 3rd
century BC onward of Greek slaves, some of whom were put to tutoring young Roman nobles.
Among them was Livius Andronicus, who was later freed and who is considered to be the first
Latin writer. In 240 BC, to celebrate Rome’s victory over Carthage, he composed a
genuine drama adapted from the Greek. His success established a tradition of performing such
plays alongside the cruder native entertainments. He also made a translation of the Odyssey. For
his plays Livius adapted the Greek metres to suit the Latin tongue; but for his Odyssey he
retained a traditional Italian measure, as did Gnaeus Naevius for his epic on the First Punic
War against Carthage. Scholars are uncertain as to how much this metre depended on quantity or
stress. A half-Greek Calabrian called Ennius adopted and Latinized the Greek hexameter for his
epic Annales, thus further acquainting Rome with the Hellenistic world. Unfortunately his work
survives only in fragments.

The Greek character thus imposed on literature made it more a preserve of the educated elite. In
Rome, coteries emerged such as that formed around the Roman consul and general Scipio
Aemilianus. This circle included the statesman-orator Gaius Laelius, the Greek Stoic philosopher
Panaetius, the Greek historian Polybius, the satirist Lucilius, and an African-born slave of
genius, the comic playwright Terence. Soon after Rome absorbed Greece as a Roman province,
Greek became a second language to educated Romans. Early in the 1st century BC, however,
Latin declamation established itself, and, borrowing from Greek, it attained polish and artistry.

Plautus, the leading poet of comedy, is one of the chief sources for colloquial Latin. Ennius
sought to heighten epic and tragic diction, and from his time onward, with a few exceptions,
literary language became ever more divorced from that of the people, until the 2nd century AD.

Golden Age, 70 BC–AD 18

The Golden Age of Latin literature spanned the last years of the republic and the virtual
establishment of the Roman Empire under the reign of Augustus (27 BC–AD 14). The first part of
this period, from 70 to 42 BC, is justly called the Ciceronian. It produced writers of distinction,
most of them also men of action, among whom Julius Caesar stands out. The most prolific was
Varro, “most learned of the Romans,” but it was Cicero, a statesman, orator, poet, critic, and
philosopher, who developed the Latin language to express abstract and complicated thought with
clarity. Subsequently, prose style was either a reaction against, or a return to, Cicero’s. As a poet,
although uninspired, he was technically skillful. He edited the De rerum natura of the
philosophical poet Lucretius. Like Lucretius, he admired Ennius and the old Roman poetry and,
though apparently interested in Hellenistic work, spoke ironically of its extreme champions,
the neōteroi (“newer poets”).

After the destruction of Carthage and Corinth in 146 BC, prosperity and external security had
allowed the cultivation of a literature of self-expression and entertainment. In this climate
flourished the neōteroi, largely non-Roman Italians from the north, who introduced the mentality
of “art for art’s sake.” None is known at first hand except Catullus, who was from Verona. These
poets reacted against the grandiose—the Ennian tradition of “gravity”—and their complicated
allusive poetry consciously emulated the Callimacheans of 3rd-century Alexandria. The Neoteric
influence persisted into the next generation through Cornelius Gallus to Virgil.

Virgil, born near Mantua and schooled at Cremona and Milan, chose Theocritus as his first
model. The self-consciously beautiful cadences of the Eclogues depict shepherds living in a
landscape half real, half fantastic; these allusive poems hover between the actual and the
artificial. They are shot through with topical allusions, and in the fourth he already appears as a
national prophet. Virgil was drawn into the circle being formed by Maecenas, Augustus’ chief
minister. In 38 BC he and Varius introduced the young poet Horace to Maecenas; and by the final
victory of Augustus in 30 BC, the circle was consolidated.

With the reign of Augustus began the second phase of the Golden Age, known as the Augustan
Age. It gave encouragement to the classical notion that a writer should not so much try to say
new things as to say old things better. The rhetorical figures of thought and speech were
mastered until they became instinctive. Alliteration and onomatopoeia (accommodation of sound
and rhythm to sense), previously overdone by the Ennians and therefore eschewed by
the neōteroi, were now used effectively with due discretion. Perfection of form characterizes the
odes of Horace; elegy, too, became more polished.

The decade of the first impetus of Augustanism, 29–19 BC, saw the publication of

Virgil’s Georgics and the composition of the whole Aeneid by his death in 19 BC;
Horace’s Odes, books I–III, and Epistles, book I; in elegy, books I–III of Propertius (also of
Maecenas’ circle) and books I–II of Tibullus, with others from the circle of Marcus Valerius
Messalla Corvinus, and doubtless the first recitations by a still younger member of his
circle, Ovid. About 28 or 27 BC Livy began his monumental history.

Maecenas’ circle was not a propaganda bureau; his talent for tactful pressure guided his poets
toward praise of Augustus and the regime without excessively cramping their freedom.
Propertius, when admitted to the circle, was simply a youth with an anti-Caesarian background
who had gained favour with passionate love elegies. He and Horace quarreled, and after Virgil’s
death the group broke up. Would-be poets now abounded, such as Horace’s protégés, who occur
in the Epistles; Ovid’s friends, whom he remembers wistfully in exile; and Manilius, whom no
one mentions at all. Poems were recited in literary circles and in public, hence the importance
attached to euphony, smoothness, and artistic structure. They thus became known piecemeal and
might be improved by friendly suggestions. When finally they were assembled in books, great
care was taken over arrangement, which was artistic or significant (but not chronological).

Meanwhile, in prose the Ciceronian climax had been followed by a reaction led by Sallust. In
43 BC he began to publish a series of historical works in a terse, epigrammatic style studded with
archaisms and avoiding the copiousness of Cicero. Later, eloquence, deprived of political
influence, migrated from the forum to the schools, where cleverness and point counted rather
than rolling periods. Thus developed the epigrammatic style of the younger Seneca and,
ultimately, of Tacitus. Spreading to verse, it conditioned the witty couplets of Ovid, the tragedies
of Seneca, and the satire of Juvenal. Though Livy stood out, Ciceronianism only found a real
champion again in the rhetorician Quintilian.

Latin literature
Silver Age, AD 18–133
After the first flush of enthusiasm for Augustan ideals of national regeneration, literature paid the
price of political patronage. It became subtly sterilized; and Ovid was but the first of many
writers actually suppressed or inhibited by fear. Only Tacitus and Juvenal, writing under
comparatively tolerant emperors, turned emotions pent up under Domitian’s reign of terror into
the driving force of great literature. Late Augustans such as Livy already sensed that Rome had
passed its summit. Yet the title of Silver Age is not undeserved by a period that produced, in
addition to Tacitus and Juvenal, the two Senecas, Lucan, Persius, the two Plinys, Quintilian,
Petronius, Statius, Martial, and, of lesser stature, Manilius, Valerius Flaccus, Silius Italicus,
and Suetonius.

Later writers

The decentralization of the empire under Hadrian and the Antonines weakened the Roman pride
and passion for liberty. Romans began again to write in Greek as well as Latin. The “new
sophistic” movement in Greece affected the “novel poets” such as Florus.
An effete culture devoted itself to philology, archaism, and preciosity. After Juvenal, 250 years
elapsed before Ausonius of Bordeaux (4th century AD) and the last of the true
classics, Claudian (flourished about 400), appeared. The anonymous Pervigilium Veneris (“Vigil
of Venus”), of uncertain date, presages the Middle Ages in its vitality and touch of stressed
metre. Ausonius, though in the pagan literary tradition, was a Christian and contemporary with a
truly original Christian poet, the Spaniard Prudentius. Henceforward, Christian literature
overlaps pagan and generally surpasses it.

In prose these centuries have somewhat more to boast, though the greatest work by a Roman was
written in Greek, the Meditations of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. Elocutio novella, a blend of
archaisms and colloquial speech, is seen to best advantage in Apuleius (born about 125). Other
writers of note were Aulus Gellius and Macrobius. The 4th century AD was the age of the
grammarians and commentators, but in prose some of the most interesting work is again
Christian.

The genres

Comedy

Roman comedy was based on the New Comedy fashionable in Greece, whose classic

representative was Menander. But whereas this was imitation of life to the Greeks, to the
Romans it was escape to fantasy and literary convention. Livius’ successor, Naevius, who
developed this “drama in Greek cloak” (fabula palliata), may have been the first to introduce
recitative and song, thereby increasing its unreality. But he slipped in details of Roman life and
outspoken criticisms of powerful men. His imprisonment warned comedy off topical references,
but the Roman audience became alert in applying ancient lines to modern situations and in
demonstrating their feelings by appropriate clamour.
Unlike his predecessors, Plautus specialized, writing only comedy involving high spirits, oaths,
linguistic play, slapstick humour, music, and skillful adaptation of rhythm to subject matter.
Some of his plays can be thought of almost as comic opera. Part of the humour consisted in the
sudden intrusion of Roman things into this conventional Greek world. “The Plautine in Plautus”
consists in pervasive qualities rather than supposed innovations of plot or technique.

As Greek influence on Roman culture increased, Roman drama became more dependent on
Greek models. Terence’s comedy was very different from Plautus’. Singing almost disappeared
from his plays, and recitative was less prominent. From Menander he learned to exhibit
refinements of psychology and to construct ingenious plots; but he lacked comic force. His pride
was refined language—the avoidance of vulgarity, obscurity, or slang. His characters were
less differentiated in speech than those of Plautus, but they talk with an elegant charm. The
society Terence portrayed was more sensitive than that of Plautine comedy; lovers tended to be
loyal and sons obedient. His historical significance has been enhanced by the loss of nearly all of
Menander’s work.

Though often revived, plays modeled on Greek drama were rarely written after Terence. The
Ciceronian was the great age of acting, and in 55 BC Pompey gave Rome a permanent theatre.
Plays having an Italian setting came into vogue, their framework being Greek New Comedy but
their subject Roman society. A native form of farce was also revived. Under Julius Caesar, this
yielded in popularity to verse mime of Greek origin that was realistic, often obscene, and full of
quotable apothegms. Finally, when mime gave rise to the dumb show of the pantomimus with
choral accompaniment and when exotic spectacles had become the rage, Roman comedy faded
out.

Tragedy

Livius introduced both Greek tragedy (fabula crepidata, “buskined”) and comedy to Latin. He
was followed by Naevius and Ennius, who loved Euripides. Pacuvius, probably a greater
tragedian, liked Sophocles and heightened tragic diction even more than Ennius. His
successor, Accius, was more rhetorical and impetuous. The fragments of these poets betoken
grandeur in “the high Roman fashion,” but they also have a certain ruggedness. They did not
always deal in Greek mythology: occasionally they exploited Roman legend or even recent
history. The Roman chorus, unlike the Greek, performed on stage and was inextricably involved
in the action.

Classical tragedy was seldom composed after Accius, though its plays were constantly revived.
Writing plays, once a function of slaves and freedmen, became a pastime of
aristocratic dilettantes. Such writers had commonly no thought of production: post-Augustan
drama was for reading. The extant tragedies of the younger Seneca probably were not written for
public performance. They are melodramas of horror and violence, marked by sensational pseudo-
realism and rhetorical cleverness. Characterization is crude, and philosophical moralizing
obtrusive. Yet Seneca was a model for 16th- and early 17th-century tragedy, especially in
France, and influenced English revenge tragedy.
Epic and epyllion

Livius’ pioneering Odyssey was, to judge from the fragments, primitive, as was the Bellum

Punicum of Naevius, important for Virgil because it began with the legendary origins of
Carthage in Phoenicia and Rome in Troy. But Ennius’ Annales soon followed. This compound of
legendary origins and history was in Latin, in a transplanted metre, and by a poet who had
imagination and a realization of the emergent greatness of Rome. In form his work must have
been ill-balanced; he almost ignored the First Punic War in consideration of Naevius and became
more detailed as he added books about his own times. But his great merit shines out from the
fragments—nobility of ethos matched with nobility of language. On receptive spirits, such as
Cicero, Lucretius, and Virgil, his influence was profound.

Little is known of the “strong epic” for which Virgil’s friend Varius is renowned, but
Virgil’s Aeneid was certainly something new. Recent history would have been too particularized
a theme. Instead, Virgil developed Naevius’ version of Aeneas’ pilgrimage from Troy to found
Rome. The poem is in part an Odyssey of travel (with an interlude of love) followed by an Iliad
of conquest, and in part a symbolic epic of contemporary Roman relevance. Aeneas has Homeric
traits but also qualities that look forward to the character of the Roman hero of the future. His
fault was to have lingered at Carthage. The command to leave the Carthaginian queen Dido
shakes him ruthlessly out of the last great temptation to seek individual happiness. But it is only
the vision of Rome’s future greatness, seen when he visits Elysium, that kindles obedient
acceptance into imaginative enthusiasm. It was just such a sacrifice of the individual that the
Augustan ideal demanded. The second half of the poem represents the fusing in the crucible of
war of the civilized graces of Troy with the manly virtues of Italy. The tempering of
Roman culture by Italian hardiness was another part of the Augustan ideal. So was a revival of
interest in ancient customs and religious observances, which Virgil could appropriately indulge.
The verse throughout is superbly varied, musical, and rhetorical in the best sense.

With his Hecale, Callimachus had inaugurated the short, carefully composed hexameter narrative

(called epyllion by modern scholars) to replace grand epic. The Hecale had started a convention
of insetting an independent story. Catullus inset the story of Ariadne on Naxos into that of the
marriage of Peleus and Thetis, and the poem has a mannered, lyrical beauty. But the story of
Aristaeus at the end of Virgil’s Georgics, with that of Orpheus and Eurydice inset, shows what
heights epyllion could attain.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a nexus of some 50 epyllia with shorter episodes. He created a

convincing imaginative world with a magical logic of its own. His continuous poem, meandering
from the creation of the world to the apotheosis of Julius Caesar, is a great Baroque conception,
executed in swift, clear hexameters. Its frequent irony and humour are striking. Thereafter epics
proliferated. Statius’ Thebaid and inchoate Achilleid and Valerius’ Argonautica are justly less
read now than they were. Lucan’s unfinished Pharsalia has a more interesting subject, namely
the struggle between Caesar and Pompey, whom he favours. He left out the gods. His
brilliant rhetoric comes close to making the poem a success, but it is too strained and
monochromatic.
Didactic poetry

Ennius essayed didactic poetry in his Epicharmus, a work on the nature of the physical

universe. Lucretius’ De rerum natura is an account of Epicurus’ atomic theory of matter, its aim
being to free men from superstition and the fear of death. Its combination
of moral urgency, intellectual force, and precise observation of the physical world makes it one
of the summits of classical literature.

This poem profoundly affected Virgil, but his poetic reaction was delayed for some 17 years; and
the Georgics, though deeply influenced by Lucretius, were not truly didactic. Country-bred
though he was, Virgil wrote for literary readers like himself, selecting whatever would contribute
picturesque detail to his impressionistic picture of rural life. The Georgics portrayed the recently
united land of Italy and taught that the idle Golden Age of the fourth Eclogue was a mirage:
relentless work, introduced by a paternal Jupiter to sharpen men’s wits, creates “the glory of the
divine countryside.” The compensation is the infinite variety of civilized life. Insofar as it had a
political intention, it encouraged revival of an agriculture devastated in wars, of the old Italian
virtues, and of the idea of Rome’s extending its works over Italy and civilizing the world.

Ovid’s Ars amatoria was comedy or satire in the burlesque guise of didactic, an amusing

commentary on the psychology of love. The Fasti was didactic in popularizing the new calendar;
but its object was clearly to entertain.

Satire

Satura meant a medley. The word was applied to variety performances introduced, according to
Livy, by the Etruscans. Literary satire begins with Ennius, but it was Lucilius who established
the genre. After experimenting, he settled on hexameters, thus making them its recognized
vehicle. A tendency to break into dialogue may be a vestige of a dramatic element in
nonliterary satura. Lucilius used this medium for self-expression, fearlessly criticizing public as
well as private conduct. He owed much to the Cynic-Stoic “diatribes” (racy sermons in prose or
verse) of Greeks such as Bion; but in extant Hellenistic literature he is most clearly presaged by
the fragments of Callimachus’ iambs. “Menippean” satire, which descended from the
Greek prototype of Menippus of Gadara and mingled prose and verse, was introduced
to Rome by Varro.

Horace saw that satire was still awaiting improvement: Lucilius had been an uncouth

versifier. Satires I, 1–3 are essays in the Lucilian manner. But Horace’s nature was to laugh, not
to flay, and his incidental butts were either insignificant or dead. He came to appreciate that the
real point about Lucilius was not his denunciations but his self-revelation. This encouraged him
to talk about himself. In Satires II he developed in parts the satire
of moral diatribe presaging Juvenal. His successor Persius blended Lucilius, Horace, diatribe,
and mime into pungent sermons in verse. The great declaimer was Juvenal, who fixed the idea of
satire for posterity. Gone was the personal approach of Lucilius and Horace. His anger may at
times have been cultivated for effect, but his epigrammatic power and brilliant eye for detail
make him a great poet.

The younger Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis was a medley of prose and verse, but its pitiless skit on
the deification of the emperor Claudius was Lucilian satire. The Satyricon of Petronius is also
Menippean inasmuch as it contains varied digressions and occasional verse; essentially,
however, it comes under fiction.

With Lucilian satire may be classed the fables of Augustus’ freedman Phaedrus, the Roman
Aesop, whose beast fables include contemporary allusions.

Iambic, lyric, and epigram

The short poems of Catullus were called by himself nugae (“trifles”). They vary remarkably in

mood and intention, and he uses iambic metre normally associated with invective not only for his
abuse of Caesar and Pompey but also for his tender homecoming to Sirmio. Catullus alone used
the hendecasyllable, the metre of skits and lampoons, as a medium for love poetry.

Horace was a pioneer. In his Epodes he used iambic verse to express devotion to Maecenas and
for brutal invective in the manner of the Greek poet Archilochus. But his primary aim was to
create literature, whereas his models had been venting their feelings. In the Odes he adapted
other Greek metres and claimed immortality for introducing early Greek lyric to Latin.
The Odes rarely show the passion now associated with lyric but are marked by elegance, dignity,
and studied perfectionism.

Martial went back to Catullus for his metres and his often obscene wit. He fixed the notion
of epigram for posterity by making it characteristically pointed.

Elegy

The elegiac couplet of hexameter and pentameter (verse line of five feet) was taken over by
Catullus, who broke with tradition by filling elegy with personal emotion. One of his most
intense poems in this metre, about Lesbia, extends to 26 lines; another is a long poem of
involved design in which the fabled love of Laodameia for Protesilaus is incidentally used as
a paradigm. These two poems make him the inventor of the “subjective” love elegy dealing with
the poet’s own passion. Gallus, whose work is lost, established the
genre; Tibullus and Propertius smoothed out the metre.

Propertius’ first book is still Catullan in that it seems genuinely inspired by his passion for
Cynthia: the involvement of Tibullus is less certain. Later, Propertius grew more interested in
manipulating literary conventions. Tibullus’ elegy is constructed of sections of placid couplets
with subtle transitions. These two poets established the convention of the “soft poet,” valiant
only in the campaigns of love, immortalized through them and the Muses. Propertius was at
first impervious to Augustan ideals, glorying in his abject slavery to love and his naughtiness
(nequitia), though later he became acclimatized to Maecenas’ circle.

Tibullus, a lover of peace, country life, and old religious customs, had grace and quiet humour.
Propertius, too, could be charming, but he was far more. He often wrote impetuously, straining
language and associative sequence with passion or irony or sombre imagination.

Ovid’s aim was not to unburden his soul but to entertain. In the Amores he is outrageous and
amusing in the role adopted from Propertius, his Corinna being probably a fiction. Elegy became
his characteristic medium. He carried the couplet of his predecessors to its logical extreme,
characterized by parallelism, regular flow and ebb, and a neat wit.

Other language and literary art forms

Rhetoric and oratory

Speaking in the forum and law courts was the essence of a public career at Rome and hence of
educational practice. After the 2nd century BC, Greek art affected Latin oratory. The dominant
style in Cicero’s time was the “Asiatic”—emotional, rhythmical, and ornate. Cicero, Asiatic at
first, early learned to tone down his style. Criticized later by the revivers of plain style, he
insisted that style should vary with subject. But in public speaking he held that crowds were
swayed less by argument than emotion. He was the acknowledged master speaker from
70 BC until his death (43 BC). He expounded the history of Roman oratory in the Brutus and his
own methods in the De oratore.

The establishment of monarchy robbed eloquence of its public importance, but rhetoric remained

the crown of education. Insofar as this taught boys to marshal material clearly and to express
themselves cogently, it performed the function of the modern essay; but insofar as the
temptations of applause made it strained and affected, it did harm.

In the De oratore, Cicero had pleaded that an orator’s training should be in all liberal arts.
Education without rhetoric was inconceivable; but what Cicero was proposing was to graft onto
it a complete system of higher education. Quintilian, in his Institutio oratoria, went back to
Cicero for inspiration as well as style. Much of that work is conventional, but the first and last
books in particular show admirable common sense and humanity; and his work greatly
influenced Renaissance education.

History

Quintus Fabius Pictor wrote his pioneering history of Rome during the Second Punic War, using
public and private records and writing in Greek. His immediate successors followed suit. Latin
historical writing began with Cato’s Origines. After him there were as many historiasters, or
worthless historians, as the poetasters disdained by Cicero. The first great exception
is Caesar’s Commentaries, a political apologia in the guise of unvarnished narrative. The style is
dignified, terse, clear, and unrhetorical.

Sallust took Thucydides as his model. He interpreted, using speeches, and ascribed motives. In
his extant monographs Bellum Catilinae and Bellum Jugurthinum, he displays
a sardonic moralism, using history to emphasize the decadence of the dominant caste. The
revolution in style he inaugurated gives him importance.

Livy began his 40 years’ task as Augustus came to power. His work consummated the annalistic
tradition. If in historical method he fell short of modern standards, he had the literary virtues of a
historian. He could vividly describe past events and interpret the participants’ views
in eloquent speeches. He inherited from Cicero his literary conception of history, his
copiousness, and his principle of accommodating style to subject. Indeed, he was perhaps the
greatest of Latin stylists. His earlier books, where his imagination has freer play, are the most
readable. In the later books, the more historical the times become, the more disturbing are his
uncritical methods and his patriotic bias. Livy’s work now is judged mainly as literature.

Tacitus, on the other hand, stands higher now than in antiquity. Though his anti-imperial bias in
attributing motives is plain, his facts can rarely be impugned; and his evocation of the terrors
of tyranny is unforgettable. He is read for his penetrating characterizations, his drama,
his ironical epigrams, and his unpredictability. His is an extreme development of the Sallustian
style, coloured with archaic and poetic words, with a careful avoidance of the commonplace.

Suetonian biography apart, historiography thereafter degenerated into handbooks

and epitomes until Ammianus Marcellinus appeared. He was refreshingly detached, rather ornate
in style, but capable of vivid narrative and description. He continued Tacitus’ account
from Domitian’s death to AD 378, more than half his work dealing with his own times.

Biography and letters

The idea of comparing Romans with foreigners was taken up by Cornelius Nepos, a friend of
Cicero and Catullus. Of his De viris illustribus all that survive are 24 hack pieces about worthies
long dead and one of real merit about his friend Atticus. The very fact that Atticus and Tiro
decided to publish nearly 1,000 of Cicero’s letters is evidence of public interest in people.
Admiration of these fascinating letters gave rise to letter writing as a literary genre. The
younger Pliny’s letters, anticipating publication, convey a possibly rose-tinted picture of
civilized life. They are nothing to his spontaneous correspondence with Trajan, where one learns
of routine problems, for instance with Christians confronting a provincial governor in Bithynia.
The letter as a verse form, beginning with striking examples by Catullus, was established by
Horace, whose Epistles carry still further the humane refinement of his gentler satires.

Suetonius’ lives of the Caesars and of poets contain much valuable information, especially since
he had access to the imperial archives. His method was to cite in categories whatever he found,
favourable or hostile, and to leave this raw material to the judgment of the reader. The Historia
Augusta, covering the emperors from 117 to 284, is a collection of lives in the Suetonian
tradition. Tacitus’ Agricola was an admiring, but not necessarily overcoloured, biographical
study.

Some of the most valuable autobiography was incidental, such as Cicero’s account of his

oratorical career in the Brutus. Horace’s largely autobiographical Epistles I was sealed with a
miniature self-portrait. Ovid, in exile and afraid of fading from Rome’s memory, gave an
invaluable account of his life in Tristia IV.

Philosophical and learned writings

The practical Roman mind produced no original philosopher. Apart from Lucretius the only
name that demands consideration is Cicero’s. He was trained at Athens in the eclectic New
Academy, and eclectic he apparently remained, seeking a philosophy to fit his own constitution
rather than a logical system valid for all. He used the dialogue form, avowedly in order to make
people think for themselves instead of following authority. Essentially, he was a philosophical
journalist, composing works that became one of the means by which Greek thought was
absorbed into early Christian thinking. The De officiis is a treatise on ethics. The dialogues do
not follow the Platonic, or dialectic, pattern but the Aristotelian, in which speakers expounded
already formed opinions at greater length.

Nor were the Romans any more original in science. Instead, they produced encyclopaedists such
as Varro and Celsus. Pliny’s Natural History is a fascinating ragbag, especially valuable for art
history, though it shows to what extent Hellenistic achievement in science had become confused
or lost.

Literary criticism

Cicero’s Brutus and the 10th book of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria provide examples of

general criticism. Cicero stressed the importance of a well-stocked mind and native wit against
mere handbook technique. By Horace’s day, however, it had become more timely to insist on the
equal importance of art. Some of Horace’s best criticism is in the Satires (I, 4 and 10; II, 1), in
the epistle to Florus (II, 2), and in the epistle to Augustus (II, 1), a vindication of the Augustans
against archaists. But it was his epistle to Piso and his sons (later called Ars poetica) that was so
influential throughout Europe in the 18th century. It supported, among acceptable if trite theses,
the dubious one that poetry is necessarily best when it mingles the useful (particularly moral)
with the pleasing. Much of the work concerned itself with drama. The Romans were better at
discussing literary trends than fundamental principles—there is much good sense about this in
Quintilian, and Tacitus’ Dialogus is an acute discussion of the decline of oratory.

Fiction
Republican and early imperial Rome knew no Latin fiction beyond such things as Sisenna’s
translation of Aristides’ Milesian Tales. But two considerable works have survived from imperial
times. Of Petronius’ Satyricon, a rambling picaresque novel, one long extract and some
fragments remain. The disreputable characters have varied adventures and talk
lively colloquial Latin. The description of the vulgar parvenu Trimalchio’s banquet is justly
famous. Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass) has a hero who has accidentally been
changed into an ass. After strange adventures he is restored to human shape by the goddess Isis.
Many passages, notably the story of Cupid and Psyche, have a beauty that culminates in the
apparition of Isis and the initiation of the hero into her mysteries.

Lancelot Patrick WilkinsonRichard H.A. Jenkyns

Medieval Latin Literature

From about 500 to 1500 Latin was the principal language of the church, as well as of
administration, theology, philosophy, science, history, biography, and belles lettres,
and medieval Latin literature is therefore remarkably rich. Two themes dominate the linguistic
and literary development of medieval Latin: its close and creative adaptation of the classical
heritage from which it emerged and its changing relationship with the
medieval vernacular languages. Within these two broad themes a number of subsidiary yet
significant strains can be distinguished: the emergence of national characteristics in the Latin
literature produced in different parts of Europe; the refinement of the polarity between popular
and learned Latin by the clergy’s use of a colloquialism intelligible to its audience as a lingua
franca; and the effect of certain periods of special vigour and artistic self-awareness, such as the
Carolingian revival of the 8th and 9th centuries and the new impulse given to learned and
vernacular literature in the 12th.

The 3rd to the 5th century: the rise of Christian Latin

literature

The early history of medieval Latin literature is in part the story of the reception of the classical
past by the Christians, to whom it represented secular culture. Old forms and genres were
continuously renewed over the millennium following the entrance of Christians to the circle of
literary production, dated for convenience to the conversion of Constantine to Christianity
(about AD 313). For example, the Latin epic persisted in recognizable form throughout the
period, and its authors remained in continuous contact with the great classical
exponents Lucan, Statius, and, above all, Virgil. From the 4th century, the degree of scholarly
interpretation applied to these epic poets, especially Virgil, was intensified. Virgilian technique
was imitated by many poets, among them the 4th-century Spaniard Juvencus, who versified a
portion of the Bible, and the author of the epic poem Waltharius (probably 9th century), written
in hexameters.
Even before the conversion of Constantine, Christians were developing new forms of literature,
which persisted throughout the ensuing centuries. The production of hagiographical texts (lives
of the saints) was widespread in the Middle Ages. The first Acts of the Martyrs in Latin were
written during the 3rd century, and the flowering of the form after the end of the period of
persecution of Christians shows the powerful appeal that it exercised at all levels of society.
The Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis (The Passion of SS. Perpetua and Felicity),
written in a style that owes little to classical precedent, is a distinctive early example of
the genre.

The 3rd and 4th centuries were above all an age of translation. Among the Greek patristic
writings diffused to a wider audience in the West in Latin versions, the lives of the Desert
Fathers occupied an important place. The Latin translation by Evagrius, bishop of Antioch,
of Athanasius’ Life of Saint Antony enjoyed the widest transmission, and its influence is as
marked by contrast in the early Latin Lives of the Saints as it is by imitation. Sulpicius
Severus’ biography of St. Martin, an original Latin work, greatly influenced hagiography over
many centuries. (A further, equally influential example of the genre was the Dialogues of Pope
Gregory the Great, written in about 593.)

The most important work of translation appeared at the end of the 4th century: the Vulgate,
completed by the monastic leader Jerome, replaced sporadic earlier attempts to render the Bible
into Latin. The idiom and style of the Bible’s original languages were apparent through the veil
of Jerome’s Latin, however, and provided a counterweight to the classical styles that continued
to be taught and practiced through the schools in the West. Exegesis of the text occupied many of
the greatest minds of the Middle Ages for the largest part of their careers, and the literary work
of many major authors, from Augustine and Gregory to Bede, reflects their individual
understanding of Scripture.

The early Christian liturgy also gave birth to new forms of literature. From the ancient practice
of psalmody in the churches derives the hymn. Ambrose, bishop of Milan in the second half of
the 4th century, wrote the earliest prosaic hymns, which incorporated nonliturgical texts into the
mass to be sung by the congregation. These were rapidly imitated, notably by the Spanish
poet Prudentius at the end of the century, and remained in continuous use in churches and
monasteries for more than a millennium.

A major problem of Christian thinkers in these centuries was the integration of the history of the
pagan empire with the history of salvation. Synthesis and epitome of biblical and classical
history appeared in the Historiarum adversus paganos libri VII (7 Books of Histories Against the
Pagans) of Orosius and the briefer Chronica (c. 402–404) of Sulpicius Severus. On a larger
scale, Augustine’s De civitate Dei (The City of God) offered a comprehensive view of past
history, the present, and the world to come in the light of scriptural revelation. His spiritual
autobiography, the Confessiones (Confessions), was an exploration of the philosophical
and emotional development of an individual soul. The distinctive originality of this work owed
little to classical autobiography and was unmatched by later imitations.

The Gallic schools of the 5th century gave rise to a literary culture unique in this period.
Versification of the Bible developed a new degree of exegetical and stylistic refinement, while
the letters of Paulinus of Nola and Sidonius Apollinaris, bishop of Auvergne, display a picture
of cultivated aristocratic and ecclesiastical society. Both men were also admired as poets,
Sidonius in particular as an encomiast. On the secular side, at the beginning of the century
in Rome the Egyptian poet Claudian produced the most elaborate examples of imperial verse
panegyric to a succession of dignitaries. His Raptus Proserpinae (c. 400; The Rape of
Proserpine) is one of the last examples of an extended narrative in verse that dwells wholly in
the world of pagan mythology.

The 6th to the 8th century

Gaul’s literary history is interrupted by the Frankish invasions, though there are signs that abbots
and bishops began to perceive the benefit of using literature to promote the cults of local saints.
Two figures of note are Gregory of Tours and Venantius Fortunatus, bishop of Poitiers. In
addition to a vast corpus of hagiography, Gregory produced the monumental Historia
Francorum (605–664; History of the Franks), the most extensive history of a barbarian people
that had yet been written. He set the arrival of the Franks in Gaul, and their recent past, in the
perspective of universal history.

An element of local patriotism is also discernible in his writings. Gregory was one of the many
patrons who inspired the poet Fortunatus, whose astute and pliable talent achieved distinction in
both secular panegyric and hymnody. His hagiography, in verse and in prose, also is prominent.
His style exercised a powerful appeal upon the poets of the Carolingian renaissance.

Three figures of encyclopaedic learning dominate the literature of the 6th and 7th centuries. In
the course of his long retirement from a career in public service under the Ostrogothic kings in
Italy, Cassiodorus combined zealous preservation of the literature of the classical past with an
enormously influential educational plan. His late 6th-century compendium of sacred and secular
learning, Institutiones divinarum et humanarum lectionum (An Introduction to Divine and
Human Readings), was among the shaping influences upon monastic culture. The
Roman Boethius, a Neoplatonist philosopher, wrote on arithmetic and music, but his most
popular and influential work was De consolatione philosophiae (1882–91; The  Consolation of
Philosophy), written in about 524, when Boethius was imprisoned under sentence of execution.
The Spaniard Isidore produced a series of encyclopaedic compilations that were used as
repositories of diverse learning by later centuries. It was midway through the 6th century that the
last major Latin work was produced in the Eastern Empire: the epic Iohannis of the African poet
Corippus.

The conversion of the Saxons began to bear literary fruit during the 7th and early 8th centuries.
In an elaborate and allusive style, Aldhelm, bishop of Sherborne, wrote, first in prose and later in
verse, a treatise on sainthood called De Virginitate. In the kingdom of Northumbria, particularly
open to influence of Irish monastic learning, St. Bede the Venerable devoted his life to
scholarship. The culmination of his work is the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (The
Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of England), completed in 731. Synthesized from a
variety of sources, literary and nonliterary, the work charts the involvement of God with the
English people and the relation of the English church to the Christian world centred on Rome.

The Carolingian renaissance

The revival of letters, accompanied by wide-scale copying of classical texts, to which the reign
of Charlemagne (768–814) gave fresh impetus, produced some of the most brilliant literary
achievements of the Latin Middle Ages. An international elite of scholars, among whom the
most distinguished were the Anglo-Saxon Alcuin, the Visigoth Theodulf of Orléans, and the
Italians Paulinus of Aquileia and Paul the Deacon, produced a body of lyric, epic,
and didactic poetry (both sacred and secular, both religious and political) unmatched in the
earlier period. The revival of epic, and the secularization of the sacred hero, occurred in
the extant third book of a lost and larger Virgilian epic, anonymously transmitted but known by
the title Karolus Magnus et Leo Papa (“Charlemagne and Pope Leo”). Its example was followed
in the next generation by Ermoldus Nigellus, writing about the deeds of Louis the Pious, and the
tradition of earlier Carolingian authors is extended by two major political poets, Walafrid
Strabo and Sedulius Scottus (also the author of an uproarious mock epyllion). In prose the major
achievements lie in the fields of biography, with Einhard’s Vita Karoli Magni (c. 830; Life of
Charlemagne); of religious controversy, with Theodulf’s Libri Carolini (defenses written at
Charlemagne’s request); and of theology, with John Scotus Erigena’s metaphysical masterpiece,
the Periphyseon.

The 9th to the 11th century

From the later 9th century on, the liturgy gave rise to two new literary forms: the sequence and
the liturgical drama. Notker Balbulus, monk of St. Gall, was not the first to compose sequences,
but his Liber hymnorum (“Book of Hymns”), begun about 860, is an integrated collection of
texts that spans the whole of the church year in an ordered cycle. Performed between the biblical
readings in the mass, each sequence is a free meditation upon scriptural themes, often drawing
upon and synthesizing disparate texts. Among later exponents of the genre, Adam of St. Victor
was the most distinguished, though the mystical sequences of Hildegard of Bingen exercise a
potent appeal. During the same period the enormous expansion of the cult of the Virgin left a
notable mark upon hymnody, the early 11th century seeing the composition of Marian hymns,
including such ubiquitous texts as “Salve Regina” (“Hail, Queen”) and “Alma Redemptoris
Mater” (“Sweet Mother of the Redeemer”).

Notker’s sequences are alive with dramatic possibility, and at St. Gall the practice of troping, or
embellishing, liturgical texts also took dramatic form. The Quem quaeritis trope
from St. Martial, an abbey at Limoges, was one of the earliest such pieces to demand dramatic
performance. From this beginning developed the long tradition of liturgical drama, which, like
the sequence, is centred upon the major feasts of the church year.
Two narrative works stand out in this period. The Waltharius epic is set in the years of the
invasions of Attila the Hun. The sophistication of its narrative technique contrasts with its
Germanic subject matter. The Ruodlieb, a romance written perhaps in about 1050 in a language
heavily influenced by vernacular usage, reveals a comparable narrative subtlety. Even in its
fragmentary state, the variety and vigour of its episodes are apparent.

The ease with which religious forms such as the sequence are adapted for secular use is nowhere
seen better than in the 11th-century compilation known as the Cambridge Songs. The blend of
humorous contes, hymnody, and lyric testifies to a diverse taste in the unknown anthologist.
Other lyric collections from the next century, such as the Ripoll and Arundel lyrics, may draw
upon work of earlier provenance. To the chance survival of individual compilations such as these
derives the bulk of knowledge of the secular lyric, which is one of the chief distinctions of the
12th and 13th centuries.

The 12th to the 14th century

The Carmina Burana (“Songs from Bavaria”), the largest and greatest collection of secular
lyrics, comes from the Benediktbeuern, a Benedictine monastery in Bavaria. It was put together
in the 13th century, though most of the songs are much older, and contains work by many of the
finest poets of the age. The contents are divided by subject into moral and satirical verse, love
poetry, drinking songs, and liturgical dramas. Walter of Châtillon and Philip the Chancellor
are conspicuous among the authors of the satires, the force of their works deriving from learned
and allusive use of Scripture. Peter of Blois is found in the section of satirical verse and the
section of love poetry. His verse forms achieve a new degree of delicacy and sophistication, and
his erotic poetry owes much to a close study of classical poets, particularly Ovid. Yet many of
the forms in evidence, the pastourelle (a love debate between a knight and a shepherdess) for
example, have no classical antecedent. In the complexity of its argument and profusion of
imagery, a poem such as “Dum Diane vitrea” (“While Shining Diane”) far exceeds the
imagination of any classical author. Among the drinking songs in the third section are works of
the anonymous German “Archpoet” and of Hugh Primas of Orléans, a slightly earlier figure.
Under the cover of a pointedly low-life persona, these poets, both prominent men in court
society, practiced a robust form of satire in which much of the humour is deflected upon
themselves. Grander forms of poetry are not neglected: Walter of Châtillon’s foray into epic,
the Alexandreis (written c. 1180), is one of the most distinguished products of
the medieval fascination with the legends of Alexander the Great, and it exercised an immense
influence on subsequent vernacular literature.

The 12th century was an age of philosophical development, above all in the cathedral schools (as
at Chartres) and new universities (as at Paris). Scholars such as Alain of Lille (Alanus de Insulis)
and John of Salisbury returned to philosophical problems that had been posed in the days of
Boethius. With Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, and Robert Grosseteste, the first chancellor
of Oxford University, a significant English contribution is discernible. Peter Abelard trained at
Paris, where he taught John of Salisbury. Of Abelard’s philosophical works, Sic et
non (completed c. 1136; “Yes and No”) is the most notable, probing critically the vast bulk of
received authority. In three of his most original literary works, the relationship with Héloïse is a
prominent feature. The Hymnarius Paraclitensis is a collection of hymns for Héloïse’s convent,
where the reading of Scripture is complex and shows the imprint of novel theological thought.
The six planctus (“laments”) are meditations on guilt and suffering, set in the mouths of biblical
personages, while the correspondence between Abelard and Héloïse reflects themes found in
both verse collections. Abelard’s autobiographical work, the Historia
calamitatum (written c. 1136; The Story of Abelard’s Adversities), recounts the story of his tragic
love affair and its theological consequences.

Liturgical and cultic innovation left its mark upon Latin literature during the 13th and 14th
centuries. John of Garland’s compilation of hymns to the Virgin is a late testimony to the force
of Marian inspiration. From the early 13th century derive two of the latest sequences to feature in
the liturgy in all countries, the “Dies irae” (“The Day of Wrath”) and the “Stabat Mater” (“The
Mother Stands”). The cults of the Holy Cross and of the Passion are the impetus to the poetry of
two Franciscans, the Italian St. Bonaventura and John Pecham in England. Pecham’s Philomena
praevia is an extended lyrical meditation that blends the story of the Redemption with the
liturgical course of a single day.

The theology of the 13th century is dominated in bulk and stature by the writings of St.
Thomas Aquinas. The culmination of a career centred upon Paris and Rome is the Summa
theologiae (written between 1265 and 1272), a systematic exposition of the essentials of faith,
grounded in Aristotelian principles. The translation of Aristotle into Latin continued throughout
the century. Aquinas’ liturgical works also remained prevalent.

Renaissance Latin Literature
The term Renaissance Latin is associated, for 14th-century Italy, mainly with Dante, Petrarch,
and Boccaccio, though mention should also be made of the Florentine historian Leonardo
Bruni and the humanist scholars Albertino Mussato, Coluccio Salutati, and Aeneas Silvius
Piccolomini (Pope Pius II). In verse there was a general return to classical models and elegance,
while in prose Latin was still a necessary medium for the abundant humanistic, scientific,
philosophical, and religious literature that was a mark of the new age.

In Italy there were three main centres of learning and literature in the 15th and 16th centuries:
Florence, Rome, and Naples. Each had its own circle of writers and scholars. The Florentine
group was noted for the Platonist philosophers Poggio Bracciolini, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni
Pico della Mirandola, and a poet and scholar, Angelo Poliziano. Rome was the centre for a
grammarian, Pietro Bembo, and for Marco Vida, author of a Latin epic on the redemption, while
Naples was the home of poets and scholars, notably Giovanni Pontano, Jacopo
Sannazzaro, Lorenzo Valla, and Girolamo Fracastoro.

Germany and the Low Countries also made a large contribution in prose and verse to Latin
literature in the 15th and 16th centuries. Many humanists owed their early education to
the Brethren of the Common Life, a Dutch Christian community that laid great emphasis on the
classics. Among these was Desiderius Erasmus, the greatest figure of the northern Renaissance.
Bred in the rhetorical tradition of literary humanism, he had little interest in the scientific
premonitions of the age. As an editor and expositor of classical texts and the writings of the
Church Fathers, as a commentator on the ecclesiastical conflicts of his time, and as a scholar,
wit, and satirist, he was unsurpassed by any humanist in northern Europe. A German abbot,
Johannes Trithemius, was a historian and scholar with an immense range of interests and
knowledge; Conradus Celtis was conspicuous as a humanist and poet; while Petrus Lotichius
wrote elegant verse.

Spanish humanism was best seen in the scholar and friend of Erasmus, Juan Vives, while in
England the statesman and scholar Sir Thomas More was the outstanding figure. Polydore Virgil,
an Italian, brought the new methods of historical writing into England, though a poet and
historian, Tito Livio Frulovisi, had written a life of Henry V that influenced later English writers.
Among many Latin poets should be mentioned George Buchanan and John Barclay, both Scots.
The strong English tradition of classical verse composition in the schools was shown in the Latin
poems of such 17th-century poets as John Milton, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw,
and Abraham Cowley.

In France, where, as in England, the Renaissance came late, some members of the group of
writers known as La Pléiade wrote Latin verse. Despite the eventual triumph of the
French vernacular, Latin poems continued to be written, and several hymns composed in
classical forms were included in church services in the 17th and 18th centuries.