Short answers, pulled from the story.
Augustan literature refers to Latin writing produced during the reign of Augustus, Rome's first emperor, from 27 BC to AD 14. Early twentieth-century literary historians grouped it with Late Republican writing to define the Golden Age of Latin literature, a period of stylistic classicism.
The central figures include Virgil (70-19 BC), Horace (65-8 BC), Propertius (50-15 BC), Ovid (43 BC-18 AD), and the historian Livy (64 BC-12 AD). Vitruvius, who wrote the multi-volume De architectura, was also a prominent prose writer of the period.
The exact reasons remain one of literary history's great mysteries. Ovid described his banishment only as carmen et error, Latin for a poem and a mistake, without specifying which poem or what error. Scholars have debated the cause for centuries.
The Aeneid is the most important of the Latin epics, written by Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 BC). While it addresses Rome's origins, it also permits complex readings on the source of Roman power and the responsibilities of leadership, resisting a simple reading as imperial propaganda.
Most writers classified as Augustan, including Virgil, Horace, and Propertius, established their careers during the triumviral years before Octavian took the title Augustus. Ovid, born in 43 BC, is the poet whose work is most thoroughly embedded in the Augustan regime itself.
Augustus and his circle expressed official ideology through aesthetic media, making poetry and architecture political instruments. Scholars focus closely on tone, analyzing whether individual works advance, support, criticize, or undermine the regime's social and political attitudes.