Latin Literature

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Introduction; The Latin Tradition; Characteristics of Latin Literature; Early Period; The Golden Age: Poetry; The Golden Age: Prose; The Silver Age; Late Period; Early Christian Writing; Latin Literature of the Middle Ages; Latin Literature of the Renaissance

Introduction

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Latin Literature, literature of ancient Rome, and of much of western Europe through the Middle Ages (5th century to 15th century) and into the Renaissance (14th century to 17th century), written in the Latin language.

The Latin Tradition

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Latin literature first appeared in the 3rd century bc, and its tradition has continued, in various forms, to the present (see Ancient Rome). The disintegration of the Roman Empire between the 2nd and 5th century (see Roman Empire) and the gradual development of the Romance languages out of Vulgar Latin (the nonliterary language of the general populace) did not for centuries affect the position of Latin as the preeminent literary language of western Europe. Latin literature, in a Christianized form, continued to develop during the Middle Ages, when Latin served as the official language of the Roman Catholic church. With the rise of Renaissance humanism in the 14th century and its emphasis on reviving the classical forms of the ancient world came a new burst of creativity in Latin, which lasted into the 17th century. Until recent times, in Western culture, an acquaintance with classical Latin (as well as Greek) literature was basic to a liberal education.

III

Characteristics of Latin Literature

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The literature of Rome was itself modeled on Greek literature and served in turn as the basic model, especially in the Renaissance during the 14th and 15th centuries, for the development of later European literatures. Perhaps because of their close formal dependence on Greek models, many Roman writers were concerned with emphasizing the specifically Roman quality of their experience. Perhaps most important, almost all Roman writers had to come to terms with Rome’s civilizing mission in the world. The greatest accomplishments of Roman literature are found in epic and lyric poetry, rhetoric, history (see History and Historiography), comic drama (see Drama and Dramatic Arts), and satire—the last genre being the only literary form the Romans invented.

Early Period

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Latin literature began with Lucius Livius Andronicus, who came to Rome as a Greek-speaking slave in the late 3rd century BC. He translated Homer’s epic the Odyssey into Latin verse and wrote the first dramas in Latin as well as translations of Greek plays. The first native Roman writer was Gnaeus Naevius, who followed the example of Livius Andronicus. His comedies, produced during the last three decades of the 3rd century, were especially successful, and he also composed the Bellum Poenicum, an epic poem on the First Punic War (264-241 bc) fought between Rome and its rival, Carthage (see Punic Wars). The first really important Roman writer, however, was Quintus Ennius, famous for his Annales, a vigorous and energetic poem telling the story of Rome and its conquests in hexameter verse, which Ennius successfully adapted from Greek into Latin. Ennius’s pioneering work served as the prototype for Roman epic and was affectionately imitated by later poets, who refined his rugged style.

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Only scattered fragments remain of the works of these earliest writers, but 21 plays of the first true genius in Roman literature, the comic writer Plautus, are extant. Comedy represents Rome’s most productive contribution to the development of drama. The lively and robust plays of Plautus served as a model for much subsequent European comedy and have been performed and imitated into modern times. Plautus’s world of benighted masters, wily slaves, innocent maidens, and young men hopelessly and absurdly in love was taken over by the second Roman comic genius, Terence. Terence’s plays are smoother and more graceful than those of his predecessor, less boisterously funny but perhaps more touching.

The statesman Cato the Elder, a political conservative and the implacable enemy of Carthage, was the earliest master of Roman prose. A powerful orator, he provided the first models for Roman rhetoric. His treatise on farming, De Agri Cultura (160? BC), still survives. The great master of satire, a genre apparently invented by Ennius, was Gaius Lucilius, who gave it its standard form in which a sharply defined voice pokes ruthless fun at a wide range of human folly. Only fragments of Lucilius’s work have survived—a serious loss for the understanding of the Roman literary tradition.

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