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Curated playlist

Golden Age Latin writers

  • Cicero11 minOn the 7th of December 43 BC, soldiers caught Marcus Tullius Cicero leaving his villa in Formiae in a litter, heading for the coast and a ship bound for…
  • Julius Caesar12 minListen to Julius Caesar before the knives, the pirate captive turned general who bet everything on crossing one small, forbidden river.
  • Lucius Varius Rufus5 minLucius Varius Rufus stood at the center of Roman literary life during one of history's most celebrated creative moments.
  • Ovid10 minPublius Ovidius Naso was born on the 20th of March 43 BC in the Paelignian town of Sulmo, a place tucked into an Apennine valley east of Rome.
  • Horace9 minQuintus Horatius Flaccus, the poet the English-speaking world calls Horace, once described himself as a man who fled the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC without…
  • Virgil12 minVirgil stood on a pillar of bright tin-plated iron. That is how Geoffrey Chaucer placed him in The House of Fame, written between 1374 and 1385, granting the…
  • Catullus11 minGaius Valerius Catullus wrote two lines that translators have spent two thousand years trying to equal: "I hate and I love. You ask how this is possible.
  • Livy10 minLivy, the Roman historian born in 59 BC in the prosperous northern Italian city of Patavium, devoted the greater part of his adult life to a single…
  • Marcus Terentius Varro7 minMarcus Terentius Varro lived from 116 to 27 BC, a span that took him from the late Roman Republic into the earliest years of the Empire.
  • Gaius Julius Hyginus4 minGaius Julius Hyginus is a name that appears twice in the history of Latin letters: once as a living man who walked the halls of Roman power, and once as a…
  • Sallust13 minSallust, the Roman historian and politician born around 86 BC, left behind something almost paradoxical: the man who made moral decline the central obsession…
  • Vitruvius8 minVitruvius, the Roman architect and engineer who lived roughly from around 80-70 BC to sometime after 15 BC, left behind exactly one book.
  • Lucretius7 minTitus Lucretius Carus lived and died in the first century BC, and yet the poem he left behind nearly vanished from the world entirely.