Short answers, pulled from the story.
Classical Latin developed around 75 BC from Old Latin and evolved into Late Latin by the 3rd century AD. It remained a literary and educational standard across Europe for centuries, with periodic revivals such as Alcuin's reforms under Charlemagne and the Renaissance recovery of classical models that produced Neo-Latin.
Cicero and his contemporaries distinguished Latinitas, the elevated literary register, from sermo vulgaris or Vulgar Latin, which was the everyday vernacular. Latinitas was also called sermo urbanus (speech of the city) and sermo familiaris (speech of the good families), and it was the form taught in schools and governed by prescriptive rules.
Wilhelm Sigismund Teuffel defined the Golden Age and Silver Age in his 1870 work Geschichte der Romischen Literatur. He dated the Golden Age from 83 BC to AD 14 and the Silver Age from AD 14 to AD 117. Wilhem Wagner produced an English translation of Teuffel's work in 1873.
The central figures of the Golden Age include Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC), whose prose defines the standard for golden Latin, Gaius Julius Caesar (100-44 BC), and the Augustan poets Virgil (70-19 BC), Horace (65-8 BC), and Ovid (43 BC - AD 18). Titus Livius, the historian, born in 64 BC, is also counted among the Augustan writers.
The Silver Age produced the only two complete Latin novels that survive from antiquity: Apuleius's The Golden Ass and Petronius's Satyricon.
The major works of Latin self-analysis are Varro's De lingua latina (written 47-45 BC), Quintilian's Institutio oratoria, and Donatus's Ars grammatica. These texts documented phonology, grammar, etymology, and language change, and defined grammatical errors under categories such as barbarism and solecism that remained standard scholarly terms for centuries.