Curated category
Golden Age Latin writers
- CiceroOn 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 CaesarAround the 10th or the 11th of January 49 BC, Gaius Julius Caesar led a single legion, the Legio XIII Gemina, across a small river called the Rubicon, the…
- Lucius Varius RufusLucius Varius Rufus stood at the center of Roman literary life during one of history's most celebrated creative moments.
- OvidPublius 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.
- HoraceQuintus 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…
- VirgilVirgil 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…
- CatullusGaius 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.
- LivyLivy, 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 VarroMarcus 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 HyginusGaius 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…
- SallustSallust, the Roman historian and politician born around 86 BC, left behind something almost paradoxical: the man who made moral decline the central obsession…
- VitruviusVitruvius, the Roman architect and engineer who lived roughly from around 80-70 BC to sometime after 15 BC, left behind exactly one book.
- LucretiusTitus Lucretius Carus lived and died in the first century BC, and yet the poem he left behind nearly vanished from the world entirely.