Golden Age of Latin literature

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The golden age of Latin literature, in Latin Latinitas aurea, is a period consisting roughly of the time from 75 BC to AD 14, covering the end of the Roman Republic and the reign of Augustus Caesar. Many Classicists believe that this period represents the peak of Latin literature, and that its usage of the artificial and heavily stylized literary language known as Classical Latin represents the ideal norm which other writers should follow. Classical Latin continued to be used into the Silver Age of Latin literature, the 1st and 2nd centuries.

Classical Latin differs from Old Latin in that the early -om and -os endings have shifted into -um and -us ones. Some lexical differences also developed, such as the broadening of the meaning of words (e.g., forte meant not only "surprisingly" but also "hard").

[edit] Authors of the Golden Age

[edit] Poetry

The earliest poet considered to be Golden Age Latin is the Epicurean philosopher Lucretius, who wrote a long didactic poem On the Nature of Things in which Epicurean philosophy is expounded.

Catullus was a slightly later poet. Catullus pioneered the naturalization of Greek lyric verse forms in Latin. The poetry of Catullus was personal, sometimes erotic, sometimes playful, and frequently abusive. He wrote exclusively in Greek metres. The heavy hand of Greek prosody would continue to have a pronounced influence on the style and syntax of Latin poetry until the rise of Christianity made a different sort of hymnody become needed.

The Grecianizing tendencies of Golden Age Latin reached their apex in Virgil, whose Æneid was an epic poem after the method of Homer; in Horace, whose odes and satires were after the manner of the Greek anthology, and who used almost all of the fixed forms of Greek prosody in Latin; and in Ovid, who wrote long and learned poems on mythological subjects, as well as semi-satirical pieces such as the Ars Amatoria, the Art of Love. Tibullus and Propertius also wrote poems that were modelled after Greek antecedents.

[edit] Prose

In prose, Golden Age Latin is exemplified by Julius Caesar, whose Commentaries on the Gallic Wars display a laconic, precise, military style; and by Marcus Tullius Cicero, a practicing lawyer and politician, whose judicial arguments and political speeches, most notably the Catiline Orations, were considered for centuries to be the best models for Latin prose. Cicero also wrote many letters which have come down to us, and a few philosophical tracts in which he gives his version of Stoicism.

Historiography was an important genre of classical Latin prose; it includes Sallust, who wrote of the Conspiracy of Catiline and the War Against Jugurtha, his only works that have been preserved complete. Livy, also, was a historian; his Ab Urbe Condita, a history of Rome "from the Founding of the City," was originally in 145 books, of which only 35 have been preserved.

Ages of Latin
—75 BC	75 BC – 1st c.	2nd c. – 8th c.	9th c. – 15th c.	15th c. – 17th c.	17th c. – present
Old Latin	Classical Latin	Vulgar Latin	Medieval Latin	Humanist Latin	New Latin