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 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.
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 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.
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; 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
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Comedy
- Plautus
- Terence
Prose
- Cato - agricultural writer
Golden Age of Latin literature
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Poetry
Virgil's bust, on his tomb in Naples.
- 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
Prose
- Cicero - orator, philosopher and correspondent
- Marcus Terentius Varro - agricultural writer and linguist
- Publilius Syrus - writer of maxims
- Vitruvius - architect
History
- Livy
- Sallust
- Julius Caesar
Biography
- Cornelius Nepos
- Augustus - autobiographer
Silver Age of Latin literature
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
Pliny the Elder: an imaginative 19th Century portrait. No contemporary depiction of Pliny has survived.
- Aulus Cornelius Celsus - physician
- Aulus Gellius - essayist
- Apuleius - novellist and philosopher
- 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
- Marcus Cornelius Fronto - correspondent
History
- Florus
- Marcus Velleius Paterculus
- Tacitus
Biography
- Suetonius
- Quintus Curtius Rufus
Multiple Genres
- Seneca the Younger - philosopher, correspondent, scientist, tragedian and satirist
Latin Literature in the Late Antique period
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
Monument to Ausonius in Milan.
- Ammianus Marcellinus - historian
- Augustan History - history
- Claudian - panegyricist
- Herodian - historian
- Pervigilium Veneris - lyric poetry
Medieval Latin literature
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Main article: Medieval Latin
Theology and Philosophy
- Pierre Abélard
- Aetheria
- Albertus Magnus
- Thomas Aquinas : Pange Lingua : Summa Theologica
- Roger Bacon
- Duns Scotus
- Gildas
- Gregory of Tours
- Siger of Brabant
- Tommaso da Celano : Dies Iræ
- Venantius Fortunatus
- Walter of Châtillon
- William of Occam
- Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius - Consolation of Philosophy
Poetry
- The Archpoet
- Carmina Burana
- Goliards
- Peter of Blois
- Hildegard of Bingen
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 Seville : Etymologiæ
Multiple Genres
- Alcuin
Renaissance Latin
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- Dante Alighieri
- Giovanni Boccaccio
- Erasmus
- Jean Buridan
- Thomas More : Utopia
- Petrarch
- William of Ockham
Neo-Latin
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- Francis Bacon
- Jacob Bidermann
- Thomas Hobbes
- John Milton
- Baruch Spinoza
- Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski
- Elizabeth Jane Weston
Recent Latin
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Main article: Recent Latin
- Arrius Nurus
- Geneviève Immè
- Alanus Divutius
- Anna Elissa Radke
- Ianus Novak
- Tuomo Pekkanen
See also
External links
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