Curated category
Silver Age Latin writers
- TacitusTacitus, the Roman historian and senator who lived from roughly 56 to 120 AD, left behind a body of work so dense and so unsettling that readers have been…
- JuvenalThe name Decimus Junius Juvenalis appears in a single inscription found at Aquinum, yet the life of this Roman poet remains shrouded in speculation.
- Pliny the ElderPliny the Elder died on the 25th of August, AD 79, on a beach near Stabiae, surrounded by the ash and toxic gases of Mount Vesuvius, having gone there not to…
- PetroniusGaius Petronius Arbiter spent his days in sleep, his nights in official duties or amusement. That was not a criticism. It was his reputation, and he wore it…
- MartialMartial, the Roman poet born in Bilbilis in Hispania, left behind 1,561 epigrams that read less like literature and more like dispatches from the crowded…
- Seneca the YoungerSeneca the Younger spent his final hours in a warm bath, dictating last words to a scribe while friends gathered around him in his home.
- PersiusPersius, born Aulus Persius Flaccus on the 4th of December 34 AD, packed the full force of Roman Stoic philosophy into a single slim book of fewer than seven…
- SuetoniusSuetonius, the Roman historian born around AD 69, spent his career collecting the secrets of emperors. He recorded the earliest known accounts of Julius…
- StatiusPublius Papinius Statius grew up in the Bay of Naples during the early years of the first century. His father, a native of Velia, moved to Rome and taught…
- Gaius (jurist)Gaius was a Roman jurist who flourished between roughly AD 130 and 180, and yet almost nothing is known about who he actually was.
- QuintilianMarcus Fabius Quintilianus arrived in the world around 35 AD within the town of Calagurris, now known as Calahorra in La Rioja.
- Pliny the YoungerPliny the Younger watched a cloud rise from a mountain across the Bay of Naples and described it as resembling a pine tree, its trunk shooting upward before…
- LucanLucan was born on the 3rd of November in AD 39, in the Roman colony of Corduba, in the province of Hispania Baetica, now Córdoba, Spain.
- ApuleiusApuleius was born around 124 AD in Madauros, a colonia on the North African coast, and he described himself as "half-Numidian half-Gaetulian." He left behind…
- FrontinusFrontinus received the surrender of 70,000 Lingones in AD 70. That single figure, recorded in his own hand, captures something essential about Sextus Julius…