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In the two centuries covered by this volume, from about AD 250 to
450, the Roman Empire suffered a period of chaos followed by
drastic administrative and military reorganization. Simultaneously
Christianity emerged as a new religious force, to be first
recognized by Constantine and then eventually to become the
official religion of the Roman state. The old pagan culture
continued to provide the basis for education and the staple
literary diet of the leisured classes; but it now had perforce to
coexist and indeed to compete with a new, specifically
Christian-oriented literature. These and associated developments
are reflected in the Latin books of the period. Of the traditional
forms and genres, some atrophied, some were transformed and
invigorated; and yet others, such as autobiography in something
like the modern sense, emerged in response to the pressures of the
times. Professor Browning's masterly and comprehensive survey is
mostly concerned with pagan literature, but takes into account
Christian texts written in classical forms and directed at
classically educated readers. The volume ends with a chapter on
Apuleius by Professor Walsh, followed by a brief Epilogue from the
same hand, sketching the part played by classical studies in the
formation of the Latin literature of the Middle Ages.
'Perfection is finality; finality is death'. The poets and prose
writers of the first and early second centuries AD were not
deterred by the towering stature of their Augustan predecessors
from attempting new and often brilliant variations on the now
traditional themes and genres. The so-called 'Silver' Age of Latin
literature has tended to be characterized in terms of dismissive or
question- begging stereotypes - 'decadent', 'rhetorical',
'baroque', 'mannerist' - as a substitute for close critical
argument. From the sympathetic but searching appraisals in this
volume the best writers of the age - Lucan, Seneca, Statius,
Juvenal, Tacitus - emerge as men having something important to say
and not merely technicians preoccupied with the most extravagant or
paradoxical way of saying it. Complementary to these central
figures as giving the age its special character and atmosphere are
the minor poets, the satirists, the scholars and rhetoricians, the
lesser historians, epistolographers and technical writers, whose
varied activity provides the background to the main developments.
The whole offers a detailed portrait of the literary interests of
an age that was of necessity becoming increasingly more conscious
of the past and of the problems of coping with its cultural
heritage.
The sixty years between 43 BC, when Cicero was assassinated, and AD
17, when Ovid died in exile and disgrace, saw an unexampled
explosion of literary creativity in Rome. Fresh ground was broken
in almost every existing genre, and a new kind of specifically
Roman poetry, the personal love-elegy, was born, flourished, and
succumbed to its own success. Latin literature now became, in the
familiar modern sense of the word, classical: a balanced fusion of
what was best and most stimulating in earlier Greek and Roman
writing, charged with new and original life by the individual
genius of, most particularly, Virgil, Horace and Ovid. Augustan
literature, conventionally viewed as the expression in writing of
the age itself - political and social stability reflected in
artistic equilibrium - turns out on a close and critical reading to
have been subject to the same stresses and strains as the society
in and for which it was produced. In appraising the monumental
literary achievements of the age the underlying tensions and
contradictions are not ignored. The critical discussions in this
volume do full justice to the complexity and subtlety of the
literature itself.
This volume covers a relatively short span of time, rather less than the first three-quarters of the first century BC; but it was an age of profoundly important developments, with enduring consequences for the subsequent history of Latin literature. Original and innovative in widely differing ways as was the work of Lucretius, Sallust and Caesar in particular, the scene is dominated, historically, by two figures: Cicero and Catullus. Cicero was a politician and a man of affairs as well as a man of latters, whose vast literary output reflects a range of intellectual interests unparalleled among surviving Roman writers; creator of a prose style the Quintilian regarded as synonymous with eloquence itself; and better known to us, from his letters, as a human being, than any other figure from classical antiquity. Catullus was a poet, single-mindedly devoted to fostering the tradition of learned Alexandrian poetry at Rome; the author of one slender volume of verse that has attracted more critical attention in proportion to its size than any other ancient poetry-book; and the lover of Lesbia. In these chapters it is shown how these, and other, Roman writers of genius continued the process of transforming their traditional Greek models into new and vigorous Latin forms, with lasting effects for oratory, historiography, and the higher genres of poetry.
A collaborative critical history of Latin literature from its beginnings until the breakup of the Roman Empire in the fifth century A.D. The paperback edition has been divided into five chronological volumes. Each includes the relevant sections of the appendix of authors and works, metrical appendix and its own bibliography and index.
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