Latin literature

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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 on Italic traditions and particularly on the literary culture of Greece, which was regarded by the Romans themselves as superior.

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.

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Classical period

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Marcus Tullius Cicero

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 BC up to the mid-1st century AD, and the Silver Age, which extends into the 2nd century AD. 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 pinnacle of Latin style. Medieval Latin was often dismissed as inferior; but in fact, many great works of Latin literature were produced throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, although they are 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.

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 did not 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.

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Naturalis Historia, 1669 edition, title page.

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; it was not unusual, for example, that 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 20th century.

Although the number of works of non-fiction and drama, history and philosophy written in Latin has continued to dwindle, the Latin language is still not dead. Well into the 20th 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 literature

See Also Old Latin

Poetry

Tragedy

Lucius Livius Andronicus (c. 280/260 – c. 200 BC)
Gnaeus Naevius
Quintus Ennius (239 – c. 169 BC)
Marcus Pacuvius (c. 220 – 130 BC)
Lucius Accius (170 – c. 86 BC)

Comedy

Livius Andronicus
Gnaeus Naevius (c. 264 – 201 BC)
Titus Maccius Plautus (c. 254 – 184 BC)
Publius Terentius Afer (195/185 – 159 BC)

Satires

Gaius Lucilius (c. 160s – 103/2 BC)

Prose

Cato – agricultural writer

Golden Age

See Also Classical Latin

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Virgil's bust, on his tomb in Naples

Poetry

Lucius Pomponius – Dramatist, a writer of the Atellanae fabulae
Catullus – lyric poet and elegist
Horace – lyric poet and satirist
Lucretius – philosopher
Ovid – elegist, didactic poet and mythological poet
Propertius – elegist
Tibullus – elegist
Virgil – epic, didactic and pastoral poet
Quintus Novius – Dramatist, a writer of the Atellanae fabulae
Lucius Pomponius Secundus – Tragedian

Prose

Cicero – orator, philosopher and correspondent
Marcus Terentius Varro – writer on various subjects
Publilius Syrus – writer of maxims
Vitruvius – architect

History

Livy
Sallust
Julius Caesar

Biography

Cornelius Nepos
Augustus – autobiographer

Silver Age

Poetry

Gaius Valerius Flaccus – epic poet
Lucan – epic poet
Marcus Manilius – astronomical poet
Silius Italicus – epic poet
Statius – lyric and epic poet
Juvenal – satirist
Martial – epigrammatist
Persius – satirist
Phaedrus – fabulist

Prose

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Pliny the Elder: an imaginative 19th Century portrait. No contemporary depiction of Pliny has survived.
Aulus Cornelius Celsus – physician
Aulus Gellius – essayist
Columella – agricultural writer
Petronius – novellist
Pliny the Elder – scientist
Pliny the Younger – correspondent
Quintilian – rhetorician
Sextus Julius Frontinus – engineer
Valerius Maximus – author of a collection of anecdotes
Seneca the Elder – orator

History

Florus
Marcus Velleius Paterculus
Tacitus

Biography

Suetonius
Quintus Curtius Rufus

Multiple genres

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Ancient bust of Seneca, part of a double herm (Antikensammlung Berlin)
Seneca the Younger – philosopher, correspondent, scientist, tragedian and satirist
Curiatius Maternus – Tragedian and Sophist

Second century

Poets

Hosidius Geta – Playwright

Prose

Apuleius – novelist and philosopher
Fronto – grammarian
Aulus Gellius – essayist
Tacitus – historian

Late Antiquity

Christians

Augustine of Hippo – theologian, autobiographer and correspondent
Ausonius – elegist
Jerome – theologian and correspondent
Marcus Minucius Felix – theologian
Prudentius – Christian poet
Sidonius Apollinaris – panegyricist and correspondent
Tertullian – theologian

Non-Christians

Ammianus Marcellinus – historian
Augustan History – history
Claudian – panegyricist
Pervigilium Veneris – lyric poetry

Medieval period

See Also Medieval Latin

Theology and philosophy

Pierre Abélard
Aetheria
Albertus Magnus
Thomas AquinasPange Lingua, Summa Theologica
Roger Bacon
Duns Scotus
Meister Eckhart
Gildas
Gregory of Tours
Siger of Brabant
Thomas à KempisThe Imitation of Christ
Tommaso da CelanoDies Iræ
Venantius Fortunatus
Walter of Châtillon
William of Occam
Anicius Manlius Severinus BoethiusConsolation of Philosophy

Drama and poetry

The Archpoet
Carmina Burana
Goliards
Peter of Blois
Hildegard of Bingen
Hrotsvitha

History

Albert of Aix
Bede
Einhard
Fulcher of Chartres
Matthew Paris
Orderic Vitalis
Otto of Freising
William of Malmesbury
William of Tyre

Pseudo-history

Geoffrey of Monmouth

Encyclopedia

Isidore of SevilleEtymologiæ

Multiple genres

Alcuin

Renaissance period

Erasmus by Holbein
Erasmus by Holbein

See Also Renaissance Latin

Dante Alighieri
Giovanni Boccaccio
Erasmus
Jean Buridan
Thomas MoreUtopia
Petrarch
William of Ockham

Neo-Latin

See Also New Latin

Francis Bacon
Jacob Bidermann
René Descartes
Thomas Hobbes
John Milton
Baruch Spinoza
Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski
Elizabeth Jane Weston

Recent works

See Also Contemporary Latin

Arrius Nurus
Geneviève Immè
Alanus Divutius
Anna Elissa Radke
Ianus Novak
Tuomo Pekkanen

See also

External links

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