c. 70 BCE–180 CE
Roman
A borrowed Greek inheritance recast as imperial style: epic of founding, love as metamorphosis, and the polished lyric of the city.
The climate of the age
Rome absorbs Greek models and turns them toward law, empire, and urbane self-display. Augustan poets write under a new political settlement; later Silver Age writers grow more rhetorical, satirical, and inward. Latin becomes the durable medium of European letters for a millennium.
Roman literature teaches Europe how to inherit. Virgil, Ovid, and Horace become school texts, and their Latin is the bloodstream of medieval and Renaissance writing.
- Imitation as rivalry with Greek originals
- Civic epic and the myth of founding
- Elegy, satire, and polished occasional verse
- Rhetoric as a way of seeing the world
Leading authors
Roman
Virgil
70–19 BCE
Poet of the Augustan settlement. The Aeneid recasts Homeric epic as a Roman destiny, at once celebratory and shadowed by cost.
Roman
Ovid
43 BCE–17 CE
The most playful and cruel of the Augustan poets. His myths of change became Europe’s image-bank for painters and later poets.
Roman
Horace
65–8 BCE
Son of a freedman who became the age’s master of the polished lyric and the conversational satire. His odes taught Europe how to sound urbane and mortal at once.