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History of Literature, Fhilosophy and Religions
(contents)

PART I
A Brief History of Western Literature
Introduction
Western Literature
The Foundations
of Western Literature
The
Bible
Classical Literature
The Middle Ages
and the Renaissance
The 17-18th Century
The 18-19th Century
Modernism
WESTERN LITERATURE
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CLASSICAL LITERATURE
see
also texts:
"Argonautica"
by
Apollonius of Rhodes
ARISTOPHANES
"Lysistrata"
ARISTOTLE
"Poetics"
SAINT AUGUSTINE "Confessions"
EURIPIDES
"Electra",
"Medea"
"The Epic
of Gilgamesh"
HESIOD
"Works And Days"
HORACE
"Ars Poetica"
JUVENAL
"Satires"
MURASAKI SHIKIBU
"The Tale of
Genji"
OVID
"Metamorphoses"
PETRONIUS
"Satyricon"
SAPPHO
"Poems"
SOPHOCLES
"Antigone"
"The
Arabian Nights"
"The Poetic Edda"
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see also illustrations:
Ovid "Metamorphoses"
illustrations by Francois Chauveau and Noel Le Mire
Ovid
"The Art of Love"
illustrations by Salvador Dali
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Most of the many
forms of literature characteristic of Western civilization
would have been familiar to a citizen of Athens in the 5th
century B.C. Although only a small proportion of the
writings of the ancient Greeks has survived, it is mostly of
the highest quality, and you do not have to be a classical
scholar to read it with pleasure although, for most of us
nowadays, that means in translation. Until recently most
Western literature was written by people who were familiar
with the works of the Greeks and could safely assume that
their readers were too. Ignorance of the classical (i.e.
Greek and Roman) tradition, and of the mythology that forms
the subject matter of most Greek poetry and drama, not only
leads to missing out on a great experience, but also raises
problems in understanding the allusions of writers active
over 2,000 years later.
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William-Adolphe
Bouguereau
Dante and Virgil in Hell |
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THE ROMANS
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At the Roman Games in
240 B.C., Livius Andronicus presented two plays, a tragedy
and a comedy. This event is sometimes seen as marking the
formal beginning of Latin (Roman) literature. Significantly,
the plays were adaptations of Greek originals, and
Andronicus was probably a Greek himself. From the beginning,
Roman culture was permeated by Greek influence. The literary
genres of the Romans, like other arts, were derived from the
Greeks, and Roman writers habitually compared themselves
with the Greeks, if only to demonstrate how they differed
from them. The "golden age" of classical Latin literature
was comparatively short, roughly a century, covering the
last years of the Republic and the reign of the Emperor
Augustus, who died in A.D. 14.
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THE EARLY PERIOD
From the earlier Republican period, we have some good
epic poetry and plays by two great playwrights, Plautus
(W.I84 B.C.) and Terence (J.159 B.C.). The surviving plays
of Plautus, which influenced Shakespeare and his
contemporaries, were adapted from earlier Athenian comedies
by writers such as Menander, although Plautus, a labourer by
trade, displayed wide knowledge and sympathy with the Roman
lower classes. Terence was a former slave and apparently an
African (born in Carthage). He died young, though six plays
survive. They too were mostly based on Menander, but
Terence, though less original than Plautus, surpassed him in
characterization. His humour was less broad, pitched at a
more cultivated audience. His plays, surprisingly acted by
nuns in medieval England, influenced Restoration comedy, as
well as the Elizabethans.
The first great figure of the golden age is that exemple of
Roman virtue, Cicero (106-43 B.C.). Primarily a statesman
and orator, he turned to literature and philosophy in later
life, but is chiefly remembered for his published speeches,
models of Latin prose, and his remarkable letters. They
cover almost every conceivable subject though the most
interesting, especially in the candid and intimate letters
to Atticus, is Cicero himself. Cicero's contemporaries
included Lucretius, the philosophical poet whose De Rerum
Natura ("On the Nature of Things") advanced that the
universe was a combination of atoms, and the lyric poet
Catullus whose work, immensely varied in mood, was published
posthumously.
Catullus had a profound influence on his contemporaries,
including Horace (65—8 B.C.), the finest poet of his day
after Virgil who, besides his Odes and Satires,
wrote an influential book on poetry, Ars Poetica.
Horace had a pervasive influence on English poetry: he was
translated by Milton, adapted by Pope and Shelley among
others, and anthologies of literary quotations find Horace a
fruitful source of apt phrases. His genial temperament and
good sense contributed to his popularity among
contemporaries. Among lesser poets of the golden age were
the elegists Tibullus, a friend of Horace and the subject of
one of Horace's most charming Epistles, and Propertius, who
was inspired, like so many, by his love for a woman,
Cynthia.
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Virgil |
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VIRGIL
The poet Virgil (70-19 B.C.) was overall the most widely
read - by generations of schoolboys not always willingly -
poet in the Western world up to the 19th century. He was of
Celtic origin, a farmer's son and himself owner of a farm in
Mantua, where he wrote most of the pastoral Eclogues,
which established his popularity, and the Georgics,
influenced by Hesiod and certain-v the finest poem on
farming ever written. Reclusive and inclined to self-doubt,
Virgil spent the last decade of his life writing the
Aeneid, the work on which his reputation as "the Latin
Homer" rests. The subject of this epic is the greatness of
Rome, and Virgil can be regarded as the first "national"
poet. Aeneas was a Trojan prince, whom legend recorded as
the founder of Rome, and the theme recalls both the
Odyssey and the Iliad. The first six books
recount the hero's search for a home, while the last six
deal with war and reconciliation between Trojans and Latins.
For some readers, Virgil's imagery, especially in the
Georgics, is supreme, while the music of his elegant
hexameters is universally admired: "the stateliest measure",
said Tennyson, "ever moulded by the lips of man".
Virgil died with the Aeneid unfinished. His express
wish that it be destroyed was fortunately vetoed by the
Emperor Augustus.
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"Arms, and the man I sing, who,
forc'd by fate,
And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate,
Expell'd and exil'd, left the Trojan shore.
Long labors, both by sea and land, he bore,
And in the doubtful war, before he won
The Latian realm, and built the destin'd town;
His banish'd gods restor'd to rites divine,
And settled sure succession in his line,
From whence the race of Alban fathers come,
And the long glories of majestic Rome.
O Muse! the causes and the crimes relate;
What goddess was provok'd, and whence her hate;
For what offense the Queen of Heav'n began
To persecute so brave, so just a man;
Involv'd his anxious life in endless cares,
Expos'd to wants, and hurried into wars!
Can heav'nly minds such high resentment show,
Or exercise their spite in human woe?"
Virgil
Aeneid
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OVID
The most felicitous of poets, Ovid (43 B.C.—A.D. 17) was a
sophisticated social creature, the toast of fashionable Rome
until, after antagonizing Augustus (partly by his manual of
courtship and sex The Art of Love), he was banished
to the Black Sea and died in exile. Of his surviving works,
the best known is Metamorphoses, brilliant reworkings
of the old myths in a more sceptical era, in which love,
Ovid's greatest subject, is seen as the great agent of
change. It was extremely popular in the Middle Ages and, it
is said, was read more than any other book except the Bible.
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Why, I ask, does the bed
seem so hard? I keep throwing off the bedclothes, and I'm
sleepless through nights that seem interminable. I toss and
turn till my tired bones ache. I might feel this way if I
were being tried by Love. Has the clever god slipped in and
made a secret attack on me?
Aye, so it is! Love's
slender shafts feather my heart, and he twists my emotions
in a savage gyre. Shall I surrender, or shall I fan the
unexpected fire brighter by struggling against it? Ah, I'll
surrender; for a burden feels lighter if borne willingly.
"I've seen flames leap
higher as a torch is whipped through the air, and I've seen
them die when no one stirs them. Oxen who've learned to like
the plow aren't beaten like the animals who jerk away from
the first touch of the yoke. The skittish horse is broken
with a toothed bit, but the veteran warhorse doesn't feel
the reins.
Love goads the unwilling
more sharply and viciously than it does those who admit they
are enslaved. All right, then--I admit I'm your latest
conquest, Cupid. I raise my conquered hands to accept your
will. There's no point in fighting: I only ask your mercy
and your peace. You would gain little honor from destroying
an unarmed victim like me.
Bind myrtle in your hair,
yoke the doves of your mother Venus, and borrow a chariot
from your stepfather Mars. Let the yoked birds draw you in
that chariot past the crowd cheering your triumph. Captive
youths and maids will follow you; such will be the pomp of
your splendid triumph. Because I am newly captured, I still
show my wounds and bear the marks of recent fetters on my
mind.
You drag along Good Sense
with her hands tied behind her back, and with her goes Shame
and anyone else who dares oppose the forces of Love. All
peoples fear you; the mob raises its hands to you and cries,
"Hail, Thou Triumphant!" to you. "
Ovid Amores
(translated by D. Drake)
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Ovid
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
born March 20, 43 BC, Sulmo, Roman Empire [now Sulmona,
Italy]
died AD 17, , Tomis, Moesia [nowConstanţa, Rom.]
Latin in full Publius Ovidius Naso Roman poet noted
especially for his Ars amatoria and Metamorphoses. His verse
had immense influence both by its imaginative
interpretations of classical myth and as an example of
supreme technical accomplishment.
Life.
Publius Ovidius Naso was, like most Roman men of letters,
aprovincial. He was born at Sulmo, a small town about 90
miles (140 km) east of Rome. The main events of his life are
described in an autobiographical poem in the Tristia
(Sorrows). His family was old and respectable, and
sufficiently well-to-do for his father to be able to send
him and his elder brother to Rome to be educated. At Rome he
embarked, under the best teachers of the day, on the study
of rhetoric. Ovid was thought to have the makings of a good
orator, but in spite of his father's admonitions he
neglected his studies for the verse-writing that came so
naturally to him.
As a member of the Roman knightly class (whose rank lay
between the commons and the Senate) Ovid was marked by his
position, and intended by his father, for an official
career.First, however, he spent some time at Athens (then a
favourite finishing school for young men of the upper
classes) and traveled in Asia Minor and Sicily. Afterward he
dutifully held some minor judicial posts, the first steps on
the official ladder, but he soon decided that public life
did not suit him. From then on he abandoned his official
career tocultivate poetry and the society of poets.
Ovid's first work, the Amores (The Loves), had an immediate
success and was followed, in rapid succession, by the
Epistolae Heroidum, or Heroides (Epistles of the Heroines),
the Medicamina faciei (“Cosmetics”; Eng. trans. The Art of
Beauty), the Ars ama to ria (The Art of Love), and the
Remedia amoris (Remedies for Love), all reflecting the
brilliant, sophisticated, pleasure-seeking society in which
hemoved. The common theme of these early poems is love and
amorous intrigue, but it is unlikely that they mirror Ovid's
own life very closely. Of his three marriages the first two
were short-lived, but his third wife, of whom he speaks with
respect and affection, remained constant to him until his
death. At Rome Ovid enjoyed the friendship and encouragement
of Marcus Valerius Messalla, the patron of a circle which
included Tibullus, whom Ovid knew only for a short time
before his untimely death. Ovid's other friends included
Horace, Sextus Propertius, and the grammarian Hyginus.
Having won an assured position among the poets of the day,
Ovid turned to more ambitious projects, the Metamorphosesand
the Fasti (“Calendar”). The former was nearly complete, the
latter half finished, when his life was shattered by a
sudden and crushing blow. In AD 8 the emperor Augustus
banished him to Tomis (or Tomi; near modern Constanţa,
Romania) on the Black Sea. The reasons for Ovid's exile will
never be fully known. Ovid specifies two, his Ars amatoria
and an offense which he does not describe beyond insisting
that it was an indiscretion (error), not a crime (scelus).
Of the many explanations that have been offered of this
mysterious indiscretion, the most probable is that he had
become an involuntary accomplice in the adultery of
Augustus' granddaughter, the younger Julia, who also was
banished at the same time. In 2 BC her mother, the elder
Julia, had similarly been banished for immorality, and the
Ars amatoria had appeared while this scandal was still fresh
in the public mind. These coincidences, together with the
tone of Ovid's reference to his offense, suggest that he
behaved in some way that was damaging both to Augustus'
program of moral reform and to the honour of the imperial
family. Since his punishment, which was the milder form of
banishment called relegation, did not entail confiscation of
property or loss of citizenship, his wife, who was
well-connected, remained in Rome to protect his interests
and to intercede for him.
Exile at Tomis, a half-Greek, half-barbarian port on the
extreme confines of the Roman Empire, was a cruel punishment
for a man of Ovid's temperament and habits. Henever ceased
to hope, if not for pardon, at least for mitigation of
sentence, keeping up in the Tristia and the Epistulae ex
Ponto (“Letters from the Black Sea”) a ceaseless stream of
pathetic pleas, chiefly through his wife and friends, to the
emperor. But neither Augustus nor his successor Tiberius
relented, and there are hints in the later poems that Ovid
was even becoming reconciled to his fate when death released
him.
Works.
Ovid's extant poems are all written in elegiac couplets
except for the Metamorphoses. His first poems, the Amores
(The Loves ), were published at intervals, beginning about
20 BC, in five books. They form a series of short poems
depictingthe various phases of a love affair with a woman
called Corinna. Their keynote is not passion but the witty
and rhetorical exploitation of erotic commonplace; they
chronicle not a real relationship between Ovid and Corinna
(who is a literary construct rather than a real woman) but
all the vicissitudes of a typical affair with a woman of the
demimonde.
In the Heroides (Heroines) Ovid developed an idea already
used by Propertius into something like a new literary genre.
The first 15 of these letters are purportedly from legendary
ladies such as Penelope, Dido, and Ariadne to absent
husbands or lovers. The letters are really dramatic
monologues, in which the lessons of Ovid's rhetorical
education, particularly the exercises called ethopoiea
(“character drawing”), are brilliantly exploited. The
inherent monotony of subject and treatment, which all Ovid's
skill could not completely disguise, is adroitly transcended
in the six later epistles of the Heroides. These form three
pairs, the lover addressing and being answered by the lady.
In them, Ovid's treatment of his literary sources is
particularly ingenious; the correspondence of Paris and
Helen is one of antiquity's minor masterpieces.
Turning next to didactic poetry, Ovid composed the
Medicamina faciei, a witty exercise of which only 100 lines
survive. This frivolous but harmless poem was followed in 1
BC by the notorious Ars amatoria, a manual of seduction and
intrigue for the man about town. The lover's quarry, in this
work, is ostensibly to be sought in the demimonde (i.e.,
among women on the fringes of respectable society who are
supported by wealthy lovers), and Ovid explicitly disclaims
the intention of teaching adultery; but all of his teaching
could in fact be applied to the seduction of married women.
Such a work constituted a challenge, no less effective for
being flippant, to Augustus' cherished moral reforms, and it
included a number of references, in this context tactless if
not indeed provocative, to symbols of the emperor's personal
prestige. The first two books, addressed to men, were the
original extent of the work; a third, in response to popular
demand, was added for women. For many modern readers the Ars
amatoria is Ovid's masterpiece, a brilliant medley of social
and personal satire, vignettes of Roman life and manners,
and charming mythological digressions. It was followed by a
mock recantation, the Remedia amoris, also a burlesque of an
established genre, which can have done little to make amends
for the Ars. The possibilities for exploiting love-elegy
were now effectively exhausted, and Ovid turned to new types
of poetry in which he could use his supreme narrative and
descriptive gifts.
Ovid's Fasti (“Calendar”) is an account of the Roman year
and its religious festivals, consisting of 12 books, one to
each month, of which the first six survive. The various
festivals are described as they occur and are traced to
their legendary origins. The Fasti was a national poem,
intended to take its place in the Augustan literary program
and perhaps designed to rehabilitate its author in the eyes
of theruling dynasty. It contains a good deal of flattery of
the imperial family and much patriotism, for which the
undoubted brilliance of the narrative passages does not
altogether atone.
Ovid's next work, the Metamorphoses, must also be
interpreted against its contemporary literary background,
particularly in regard to Virgil's Aeneid . The unique
character of Virgil's poem, which had been canonized as the
national epic, posed a problem for his successors, since
afterthe Aeneid a straightforward historical or mythological
epic would represent an anticlimax. Ovid was warned against
this pitfall alike by his instincts and his intelligence; he
chose, as Virgil had done, to write an epic on a new plan,
unique and individual to himself.
The Metamorphoses is a long poem in 15 books written in
hexameter verse and totaling nearly 12,000 lines. It is a
collection of mythological and legendary stories in which
metamorphosis (transformation) plays some part, however
minor. The stories are told in chronological order from the
creation of the universe (the first metamorphosis, of chaos
into order) to the death and deification of Julius Caesar
(the culminating metamorphosis, again of chaos—that is, the
Civil Wars—into order—that is, the Augustan Peace). In
manyof the stories, mythical characters are used to
illustrate examples of obedience or disobedience toward the
gods, and for their actions are either rewarded or punished
by a final transformation into some animal, vegetable, or
astronomical form. The importance of metamorphosis is more
apparent than real, however; the essential theme of the poem
is passion (pathos), and this gives it more unity than all
the ingenious linking and framing devices the poet uses. The
erotic emphasis that had dominated Ovid's earlier poetry is
broadened and deepened into an exploration of nearly every
variety of human emotion—for his gods are nothing if not
human. This undertaking brought out, as his earlier work had
not, Ovid's full powers: his wit and rhetorical brilliance,
his mythological learning, and the peculiar qualities of his
fertile imagination. The vast quantities of verse in both
Greek and Latin that Ovid had read and assimilated are
transformed, through a process of creative adaptation, into
original and unforeseen guises. By his genius for narrative
and vivid description, Ovid gave to scores of Greek legends,
some of them little known before, their definitive form for
subsequent generations. No single work of literature has
done more to transmit the riches of the Greek imagination to
posterity. By AD 8, the Metamorphoses was complete, if not
yet formally published; and it was at that moment, when Ovid
seemed securely placed on a pinnacle of successful
achievement, that he was banished toTomis by the emperor.
Ovid arrived at his place of exile in the spring of AD 9.
Tomis was a semi-Hellenized port exposed to periodic attacks
by the surrounding barbarian tribes. Books and civilized
society were lacking; little Latin was spoken; and the
climate was severe. In his solitude and depression, Ovid
turned again to poetry, now of a more personal and
introspective sort. The Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto were
written and sent to Romeat the rate of about a book a year
from AD 9 on; they consist of letters to the emperor and to
Ovid's wife and friends describing his miseries and
appealing for clemency. For all his depression and
self-pity, Ovid never retreats from the one position with
which his self-respect was identified—his status as a poet.
This is particularly evident in his ironical defense of the
Ars in Book ii of the Tristia.
That Ovid's poetical powers were not as yet seriously
impaired is shown by his poem Ibis. This, written not long
after his arrival at Tomis, is a long and elaborate curse
directed at an anonymous enemy. It is a tour de force of
abstruse mythological learning, composed largely without the
aid of books. But in the absence of any sign of
encouragement from home, Ovid lacked the heart to continue
to write the sort of poetry that had made him famous, and
the later Epistulae ex Ponto make melancholy reading.
The loss of Ovid's tragedy Medea, which he wrote while still
in Rome, is particularly to be deplored; it was praised by
the critic Quintilian and the historian Tacitus and can
hardly have failed to influence Seneca's play on the same
theme.
Assessment.
In classical antiquity, Ovid's influence on later Latin
poetry was primarily technical. He succeeded in the
difficult task of adapting the intractable Latin language to
dactylic Greek metres, and thereby perfected both the
elegiac couplet and the hexameter as all-purpose metres and
as instruments of fluent communication. Ovid's verse is
remarkable for its smoothness, fluency, and balance. The
elegance of his verse masks its extreme artificiality, and
the casual reader may overlook the quiet ruthlessness of
Ovid's linguistic innovations, particularly in vocabulary.
Ovid's hexameters in the Metamorphoses are a superb vehicle
for rapid narrative and description.
To this technical facility Ovid added an unrivaled power of
invention that enabled him to exploit ideas and situations
to the utmost, chiefly through the use of vivid and telling
details. His undoubted rhetorical gifts have caused him to
bedubbed insincere and even heartless, and he seems indeed
to have lacked the capacity for strong emotion or religious
feeling. Judged, however, by his gift for fantasy, Ovid is
one of the great poets of all time. In the Metamorphoses he
created a Nabokovian caricature of the actual world, the
setting for a cosmic comedy of manners in which the
endlessflux and reflux of the universe itself is reflected
in the often paradoxical and always arbitrary fate of the
characters, human and divine. Pathos, humour, beauty, and
cruelty are mingled in a unique individual vision. Ovid's
talent is not of that highest order which can pierce the
outward semblance of men and things and receive intimations
of a deeper reality; but what he could do, few if any poets
have ever done better.
Influence.
Ovid's immense popularity during his lifetime continued
after his death and was little affected by the action of
Augustus, who banned his works from the public libraries.
From about 1100 onward Ovid's fame, which during late
antiquity and the early Middle Ages had been to some extent
eclipsed, began to rival and even at times to surpass
Virgil's. The 12th and 13th centuries have with some justice
been called “the age of Ovid.” Indeed, he was esteemed in
this period not only as entertaining but also as
instructive, and his works were read in schools. His poetry
is full of epigrammatic maxims and sententious utterances
which, lifted from their contexts, made a respectable
appearance in the excerpts in which medieval readers often
studied their classics. Ovid's popularity was part, however,
of a general secularization and awakening to the beauties of
profane literature; he was the poet of the wandering
scholars as well as of the vernacular poets, the troubadours
and minnesingers; and when the concept of romantic love, in
its new chivalrous or “courtly” guise, was developed in
France, it was Ovid's influence that dominated the book in
which its philosophy was expounded, the Roman de la rose.
Ovid's popularity grew during the Renaissance, particularly
among humanists who were striving to re-create ancient modes
of thought and feeling, and printed editions of his works
followed each other in an unending stream from 1471. A
knowledge of his verse came to be taken for granted in an
educated man, and in the 15th–17th centuries it would be
difficult to name a poet or painter of note who was not in
some degree indebted to him. The Metamorphoses, in
particular, offered one of the most accessible and
attractive avenues to the riches of Greek mythology. But
Ovid's chief appeal stems from the humanity of his writing:
its gaiety, its sympathy, its exuberance, its pictorial and
sensuous quality. It is these things that have recommended
him, down the ages, to the troubadours and the poets of
courtly love, to Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, J.W.
von Goethe, and Ezra Pound.
Edward John Kenney
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Rome, the Savage
City
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LATIN: THE SILVER AGE
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Although Augustus was
an authoritarian ruler, he was careful to preserve
republican traditions and exercised his power with
moderation. After his death, old fears of imperial rule
proved justified. The accession of Caligula in A.D. 37
introduced flagrant abuses, cruelty and immorality,
resulting in the Emperor's murder. The decline in the
quality of classical literature during the so-called Silver
Age seems to reflect the political decline. Freedom of
expression tended to be more limited, and there was more
rhetoric, less wit and passion.
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Plutarch |
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THE SILVER AGE
Nevertheless, the post-Augustan period was not without its
own literary giants. The Spanish-born Lucan (A.D. 39-65) was
the author of the Pharsalia, generally regarded as
the finest epic after the Aeneid, before he fell foul
of the Emperor Nero and committed suicide at Nero's command.
Seneca (4 B.C.-A.D 65), the outstanding dramatic tragedian
of the age, narrowly avoided death under Caligula, later
becoming Nero's tutor. His tragedies are adaptations from
the Greek and were highly influential in the Renaissance,
when Greek speakers were few in comparison with Latin.
Writers of prose included Pliny the Younger (c.62—c.113),
the nephew of the Pliny the Elder, whose massive work,
Historia Naturalis, was published in A.D. 77. The
younger Pliny is chiefly remembered for his Letters, some
written to the Emperor when he was a provincial governor.
They contain a memorable description of the eruption of
Vesuvius (A.D. 79) in which his uncle died while pursuing
his research too assiduously. There were also outstanding
achievements in the fields of satire and history. The most
popular classical writer during the Renaissance was Plutarch
(died c.125), a Greek, whose Lives, in the
translation by Sir Thomas North (1579), were the chief
source for Shakespeare's Roman plays.
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Juvenal |
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SATIRE
Although there were satirical elements in some Greek comedy,
satire is the one literary genre whose creation is credited
to the Romans, in particular to Gaius Lucilius, who lived in
the 2nd century B.C. He wrote a series of 'sermons' in
verse, commenting adversely on public figures and social
customs. His work is mostly lost, but he seems to have
inspired Horace's mockery of public folly and vulgarity in
his own lively Satires.
The greatest satirists, Martial and Juvenal, lived in the
1st—2nd centuries A.D. The Spanish-born Martial was a
professional poet who grew disillusioned with city life and
retired to the country. His Epigrams were published
towards the end of the 1st century and consisted of short
poems devoted to a single notion, sometimes obscene,
sometimes flattering, often mocking.
Juvenal, who was much admired by the English satirists of
the late 17th—18th century, was his younger contemporary and
friend, but a far more savage writer. His bitter irony,
ferocious invective, and hatred of the rich were directed,
so the poet claimed, at an earlier generation, but it is
obvious that this was mere form. He paints a grim picture of
life for the non-rich in the Rome of the cultured Emperor
Hadrian.
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"DIFFICILE EST SATURAM NON SCRIBERE
WHAT? Am I to be a listener only
all my days? Am I never to get my word in—I that have
been so often bored by the Theseid of the ranting Cordus?
Shall this one have spouted to me his comedies, and that
one his love ditties, and I be unavenged? Shall I have
no revenge on one who has taken up the whole day with an
interminable Telephus or with an Orestes which, after
filling the margin at the top of the roll and the back
as well, hasn't even yet come to an end? No one knows
his own house so well as I know the groves of Mars, and
the cave of Vulcan near the cliffs of Aeolus. What the
winds are brewing; whose souls Aeacus has on the rack;
from what country another worthy is carrying off that
stolen golden fleece; how big are the ash trees which
Monychus hurls as missiles: these are the themes with
which Fronto's plane trees and marble halls are for ever
ringing until the pillars quiver and quake under the
continual recitations; such is the kind of stuff you may
look for from every poet, greatest or least. Well, I too
have slipped my hand from under the cane; I too have
counselled Sulla to retire from public life and take a
deep sleep; it is a foolish clemency when you jostle
against poets at every corner, to spare paper that will
be wasted anyhow. But if you can give me time, and will
listen quietly to reason, I will tell you why I prefer
to run in the same course over which the great nursling
of Aurunca drove his horses."
Juvenal
Satire
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HISTORY
The great historians of republican Rome were Sallust (86-35
B.C.), who made a fortune as a provincial governor under
Julius Caesar, retiring to become a historian in the
tradition of Thucydides, and Livy (59 B.C.-A.D. 17). Livy
came from north Italy and, unusually, seems never to have
held political office. In spite of favouring the Republic,
he found favour with Augustus and began publishing his great
history of Rome (142 books, of which many are lost) in about
25 B.C. Though not always totally reliable, and heavily
biased by his patriotic sympathies, Livy presents the finest
account of ancient Rome from mythological times. Livy was
highly regarded by Tacitus, the great historian of the
Silver Age. Tacitus (died c. 116), son-in-law of the famous
Roman governor of Britain, Agricola, had the benefit of
wider political and military experience, and was a famous
orator. What survives of his work demonstrates extraordinary
perception of character and motivation, and a crisp, vivid
style. He was deeply affected by the brutal rule of Domitian
(reigned A.D. 81—96) and became strongly anti-imperialist,
imparting a hostile bias to his account of imperial
government.
LATIN
The Roman Empire was the basis of European civilization; for
over a thousand years after it had fallen, Europeans were
fondly trying to restore it, or something like it. The name
of the Holy (i.e. Christian) Roman Empire reflected the
eagerness of the Ottoman German kings, like Charlemagne
before them, to reclaim the greatness of the past, although,
by most measurements of "civilization", the Roman
achievement was not surpassed until the modern era. Latin
remained the standard language of educated people in Europe
and provided an international cultural bond more powerful
than a common market or a single currency. Thus Latin
literature can be said to have lasted 1,500 years after
Juvenal's death (A.D. 130), although it was no longer
"Roman". later writers being described as "Christian", if
appropriate, or by some other term.
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