Latin literature

• 1. Introduction

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  Latin literature began on a single day in 240 BC, when the first stage play in Latin was performed in Rome. The man who wrote it, Livius Andronicus, was not Roman by birth. He was a Greek prisoner of war, brought to the city as a slave in 272 BC. From that one performance grew six centuries of essays, histories, poems, and plays in the Latin language. The same language carried Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, and Horace into the world. Yet it did not die with the Empire. Centuries later, the works of Aquinas, Francis Bacon, Baruch Spinoza, and Isaac Newton would still be composed in it. How did a tongue spoken by ancient Romans become the lingua franca of learned Europe through the Middle Ages and beyond? What made it bend so easily to comedy, philosophy, satire, and science alike? The answers begin with translation, theft, and a war that had just ended.

• 2. Greek Borrowings, Roman Voices

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  Livius Andronicus translated Homer's Odyssey into Latin using Saturnian meter, a traditional Latin verse form. His stage plays, performed one year after the First Punic War ended, were adapted from Greek drama. In 235 BC, Gnaeus Naevius, a Roman citizen, carried this work forward. He produced fabula palliata, dramas reworked from Greek originals. Then he invented something new. Starting in 222 BC, his fabula praetexta were tragedies drawn from Roman myth and history rather than borrowed plots. Late in life, Naevius wrote an epic in Saturnian meter about the first Punic War, a war in which he had fought. Quintus Ennius reshaped the form again soon after 200 BC. His historical epic, the Annals, traced Roman history from the city's founding to his own day. He abandoned the old Saturnian meter for the Greek dactylic hexameter, which became the standard for Roman epic. Ennius also won fame for tragedy, as did his successors Marcus Pacuvius and Lucius Accius. These three rarely touched Roman history, preferring Latin versions of tragic themes the Greeks had already treated. Even so, their translations were never simple replicas. Only fragments of their plays survive, a loss that makes early comedy, by contrast, far better known.

• 3. The Comic Stage

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  Twenty-six early Latin comedies survive intact, and twenty of them belong to a single author, Plautus. The remaining six were written by Terence. Both men modeled their work on Greek plays known as New Comedy, but they handled the plots and wording freely. Plautus scattered songs throughout his plays. He layered in puns, wisecracks, and comic stage business for the actors. Terence took a quieter path, writing in a more austere tone about domestic situations. His plays reached far beyond his own century. They became the chief inspiration for French and English comedies of the 17th century AD.

• 4. Prose, Satire, And Cicero

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  Cato the Elder produced On Agriculture in 160 BC, the best-known prose of the early period. He wrote the first Latin history of Rome and of other Italian cities. He was also the first Roman statesman to put his political speeches in writing, using them to shape public opinion. Gaius Lucilius closed the early era with something entirely his own. Across thirty books of Satires in the 2nd century BC, he wrote in an easy, conversational voice about books, food, friends, and current events. Cicero stands as the traditional master of Latin prose. From about 80 BC until his death in 43 BC, he produced more, and in greater variety, than any surviving Latin author. His work falls into four groups: letters, rhetorical treatises, philosophical works, and orations. The letters give a vivid picture of public and private life among Rome's governing class. His writings on oratory remain the most valuable Latin sources for ancient theories of education and rhetoric. His philosophical works underpinned moral philosophy through the Middle Ages, and his speeches later inspired European political leaders and the founders of the United States. Julius Caesar and Sallust wrote history in the same years. Caesar's commentaries on the Gallic and civil wars used a plain style to justify his actions as a general, describing people and their motives.

• 5. Love, Empire, And Epic

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  Catullus, whom Aulus Gellius called "the most elegant of poets", gave Latin its first lyric poetry, prized for emotional intensity. His contemporary Lucretius laid out Epicurean philosophy in the long poem De rerum natura. Marcus Terentius Varro, called "the most learned of the Romans" by Quintilian, wrote on subjects ranging from religion to poetry, though only his works on agriculture and the Latin language survive complete. The emperor Augustus took a personal interest in the literature made during his rule, from 27 BC to AD 14. Virgil published the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the Aeneid, an epic telling how the Trojan hero Aeneas became ancestor of the Roman people. Virgil died before finishing it, yet it was soon regarded as the greatest work of Latin literature. His friend Horace wrote Epodes, Odes, Satires, and Epistles. After Virgil died, Horace was Rome's leading poet, and his Art of Poetry stated the basic rules of classical writing. The Latin elegy peaked with Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid, most of it concerned with love. Ovid's Metamorphoses wove myths into a fast-paced story that became the best-known source of Greek and Roman mythology through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Sulpicia is one of the few female poets of ancient Rome whose work survives. In prose, Livy wrote a history of the Roman people in 142 books; only 35 survived, but they remain a major source on Rome.

• 6. The Imperial Experiment

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  From the death of Augustus in AD 14 until about 200, Roman authors chased style and startling new ways of expression. Under Nero, who reigned from 54 to 68, the Stoic Seneca wrote dialogues and letters on moral themes like mercy and generosity, and analyzed earthquakes, floods, and storms in his Natural Questions. His tragedies shaped the growth of tragic drama in Europe. Seneca's nephew Lucan wrote the Pharsalia around 60, an epic on the civil war between Caesar and Pompey. Petronius produced the Satyricon around 60, the first picaresque Latin novel, surviving only in fragments and following low-class characters through absurd and dangerous scrapes in the world of petty crime. Epic flourished in this era too. Gaius Valerius Flaccus retold Jason and the Argonauts in the Argonautica, Statius the Seven Against Thebes in the Thebaid, and Silius Italicus the Second Punic War in the Punica. Martial sharpened the epigram into its stinging form, while Juvenal satirized vice. The historian Tacitus painted a dark picture of the early empire in his Histories and Annals, both written in the early 2nd century. Suetonius wrote biographies of twelve Roman rulers from Julius Caesar through Domitian. Apuleius gave the period its most famous work, Metamorphoses, also called The Golden Ass, about a young man accidentally turned into a donkey amid tales of love and witchcraft.

• 7. After Rome

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  Pagan Latin literature flared one last time from the late 3rd century into the 5th, in the history of Ammianus Marcellinus, the oratory of Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, and the poetry of Ausonius and Rutilius Claudius Namatianus. The Mosella by Ausonius showed a modernism of feeling marking the end of classical literature. Christian Latin literature took shape in the 4th and 5th centuries through the church fathers Augustine of Hippo, Jerome, and Ambrose, and the first great Christian poet, Prudentius. Writing by Christian women also survives, including the prison diary of the martyr Perpetua of Carthage and an account of pilgrimage by Egeria. The Early Middle Ages saw a burst of activity in the Carolingian Empire, mostly in modern-day France, called the Carolingian Renaissance; some 80 writers from this period appear in the Clavis Scriptorum Latinorum Medii Aevi published by Brepols. The Renaissance brought a deliberate return to classical Latin, called Neo-Latin, which stayed the lingua franca of the learned. The great works of Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Baruch Spinoza were all written in it. Among the last major books composed mainly in Latin prose were those of Swedenborg, Linnaeus, Euler, Gauss, and Isaac Newton. In Great Britain and Ireland, a Brepols handlist records some 2,000 Latin writers active before 1540, and poets like Milton, Thomas Campion, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell wrote in Latin alongside English. Walter Savage Landor was one of the last praised for Latin verse, well into the 19th century.

• 8. Why Latin Could Do This

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  Rhetoric, the art of speaking and persuading, runs through much Latin writing, because educated Romans wanted successful political careers. Under the republic, effective speech could decide an election or a bill. After Rome became an empire, the spoken word lost much of its public power, but training in rhetoric kept flourishing and shaping how people wrote. A large part of rhetoric is presenting a familiar idea in a striking new way, and Latin authors became masters of that variety. The language itself made this possible. Latin is highly inflected, carrying many grammatical forms, so it can achieve a pithiness and brevity unknown in English. Its tight syntax holds even the longest, most complex sentence together as a single logical unit. It can be lean, as in Sallust and Tacitus, or sweeping, as in Livy and the speeches of Cicero. Latin lacked the poetic vocabulary of Greek, and Roman writers seldom invented words to fix this. Instead, outside epic, they took familiar vocabulary and gave it poetic value through combinations of words and rich sound effects. Their leading poets knew the Greek poets intimately, and Greek themes appear in almost all Roman literature, which is why a reader today still needs Latin to reach the great early modern works of linguistics, literature, and philosophy.