Latin literature Totally Explained

Everything about Roman Literature totally explained

Latin literature, the body of written works in the Latin language, remains an enduring legacy of the culture of ancient Rome. The Romans produced many works of poetry, comedy, tragedy, satire, history, and rhetoric, drawing heavily on the traditions of other cultures and particularly on the more matured literary tradition of Greece. Long after the Western Roman Empire had fallen, the Latin language continued to play a central role in western European civilization.
Latin literature is conventionally divided into distinct periods. Few works remain of Early and Old Latin; among these few surviving works, however, are the plays of Plautus and Terence, which have remained very popular in all eras down to the present, while many other Latin works, including many by the most prominent authors of the Classical period, have disappeared, sometimes being re-discovered after centuries, sometimes not. Such lost works sometimes survive as fragments in other works which have survived, but others are known from references in such works as Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia or the De Architectura of Vitruvius.

Classical Latin

The period of Classical Latin, when Latin literature is widely considered to have reached its peak, is divided into the Golden Age, which covers approximately the period from the start of the 1st century BCE up to the mid-1st century CE, and the Silver Age, which extends into the 2nd century CE. Literature written after the mid-2nd century has often been disparaged and ignored; in the Renaissance, for example, when many Classical authors were re-discovered and their style consciously imitated. Above all, Cicero was imitated, and his style praised as the perfect pinnacle of Latin. Medieval Latin was often dismissed as "Dog-Latin"; but in fact, many great works of Latin literature were produced throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, although they're no longer as widely known as those written in the Classical period. Three works survived to inspire architects and engineers in the Renaissance, the Naturalis Historia of Pliny the Elder, the books by Frontinus on the aqueducts of Rome and the De Architectura of Vitruvius.

The Medieval World

For most of the Medieval era, Latin was the dominant written language in use in western Europe. After the Roman Empire split into its Western and Eastern halves, Greek, which had been widely used all over the Empire, faded from use in the West, all the more so as the political and religious distance steadily grew between the Catholic West and the Orthodox, Greek East. The vernacular languages in the West, the languages of modern-day western Europe, developed for centuries as spoken languages only: most people didn't write, and it seems that it very seldom occurred to those who wrote to write in any language other than Latin, even when they spoke French or Italian or English or another vernacular in their daily life. Very gradually, in the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, it became more and more common to write in the Western vernaculars.
It was probably only after the invention of printing, which made books and pamphlets cheap enough that a mass public could afford them, and which made possible modern phenomena such as the newspaper, that a large number of people in the West could read and write who were not fluent in Latin. Still, many people continued to write in Latin, although they were mostly from the upper classes and/or professional academics. As late as the 17th century, there was still a large audience for Latin poetry and drama; no-one found it strange, for example, that, besides his works in English, Milton wrote many poems in Latin, or that Francis Bacon or Baruch Spinoza wrote mostly in Latin. The use of Latin as a lingua franca continued in smaller European lands until the 19th century.
Although the number of works of fiction and poetry, history and philosophy written in Latin has continued to dwindle, the Latin language is still not dead. Well into the nineteenth century, some knowledge of Latin was required for admission into many universities, and theses and dissertations written for graduate degrees were often required to be written in Latin. Treatises in chemistry and biology and other natural sciences were often written in Latin as late as the early 20th century. Up to the present day, the editors of Latin and Greek texts in such series as the Oxford Classical Texts, the Bibliotheca scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana and some others still write the introductions to their editions in polished and vital Latin. Among these Latin scholars of the 20th and 21st centuries are R A B Mynors, R J Tarrant, L D Reynolds and John Brisco.

Early Latin literature

Poetry

ť Ennius

Tragedy

ť Livius Andronicus

Lucius Accius ť Pacuvius

Comedy

ť Caecilius Statius

Gnaeus Naevius ť Plautus - Captivi, Aulularia

Terence - Adelphoe

Prose

ť Cato - De Agri Cultura, Origines

Twelve Tables

Satire

ť Gaius Lucilius

Golden Age of Latin literature

Poetry

ť Appendix Vergiliana

   Catullus - Carmina, including Catullus 1, Catullus 2, Catullus 4, Catullus 5, Catullus 16, Catullus 101 ť Grattius

   Horace - Sermonum liber primus, Odes ť Lucretius - On the Nature of Things

   Ovid - Ars Amatoria, Metamorphoses, Amores ť Propertius

   Sulpicia ť Tibullus

   Virgil - Georgics, Aeneid

Prose

ť Cicero - Catiline Orations, Pro Milone, De re publica, De Officiis, Pro Archia Poeta

   Commentariolum Petitionis ť De Bello Africo

   De Bello Alexandrino ť De Bello Hispaniensis

   Julius Caesar - Commentarii de Bello Gallico ť Marcus Terentius Varro

   Publilius Syrus ť Augustus - Res Gestae Divi Augusti

   Rhetorica ad Herennium ť Vitruvius - De Architectura

History

ť Cornelius Nepos

Livy - Ab Urbe condita ť Sallust

Silver Age of Latin literature

Poetry

ť Gaius Valerius Flaccus

   Hadrian ť Laus Pisonis

   Lucan - Pharsalia ť Marcus Manilius

   Publius Annius Florus ť Silius Italicus

   Statius - Thebaid ť Titus Calpurnius Siculus

Prose

ť Aulus Cornelius Celsus

   Aulus Gellius ť Apuleius - The Golden Ass

   Columella ť Petronius - Satyricon

   Pliny the Elder - Natural History ť Pliny the Younger

   Quintilian ť Sextus Julius Frontinus - De aquaeductu

   Valerius Maximus

Satire

ť Juvenal - Saturae

Martial ť Persius

Fables

ť Phaedrus

History

ť Florus

Marcus Velleius Paterculus ť Quintus Curtius Rufus

Suetonius - On the Life of the Caesars ť Tacitus - Agricola, Histories, Germania, Annals

Multiple Genres

ť Seneca - The Pumpkinification of Claudius, De Providentia, Ad Marciam de Consolatione, Oedipus

Latin Literature in the Late Antique period

Christians

ť Augustine of Hippo - The City of God, Confessions

   Ausonius ť Jerome - Vulgate

   Marcus Minucius Felix ť Paulinus of Pella

   Prudentius - Psychomachia ť Sidonius Apollinaris

   Tertullian - Apologeticus

Non-Christians

ť Ammianus Marcellinus

   Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius ť Augustan History

   Avianus ť Claudian

   Distichs of Cato ť Eutropius

   Herodian ť Julius Obsequens

   Marcus Cornelius Fronto ť Pervigilium Veneris

   Rutilius Claudius Namatianus ť Marcus Aurelius Olympius Nemesianus

Medieval Latin literature

Theology and Philosophy

ť Pierre Abélard

   Aetheria ť Albertus Magnus

   Thomas Aquinas : Pange Lingua : Summa Theologica ť Roger Bacon

   Duns Scotus ť Gildas

   Gregory of Tours ť Siger of Brabant

   Tommaso da Celano : Dies Iræ ť Venantius Fortunatus

   Walter of Châtillon ť William of Occam

   Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius - Consolation of Philosophy

Poetry

ť The Archpoet

Carmina Burana ť Goliards

Peter of Blois ť Hildegard of Bingen

History

ť Albert of Aix

   Bede ť Einhard

   Fulcher of Chartres ť Matthew Paris

   Orderic Vitalis ť Otto of Freising

   William of Malmesbury ť William of Tyre

Pseudo-History

ť Geoffrey of Monmouth

Encyclopedia

ť Isidore of Seville : Etymologiæ

Multiple Genres

ť Alcuin

Renaissance Latin

    ť Dante Alighieri

   Giovanni Boccaccio ť Erasmus

   Jean Buridan ť Thomas More : Utopia

   Petrarch ť William of Ockham

Neo-Latin

ť Francis Bacon

   Jacob Bidermann ť Thomas Hobbes

   John Milton ť Baruch Spinoza

   Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski

Recent Latin

ť

    ť

    ť

Further Information

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