The period was thus one of beginnings in many lines. The stimulus of the Greek litera ture was almost a tyranny as to the form, espe cially in poetry, but in the writers of more original mind the Italian spirit and something of the Italian form, like the music and dances of •comedy, still maintained itself. In the period of transition to Cicero's time (about 150-84 the further growth of oratory, history and jurisprudence in prose, and the writing of plays on Italian subjects and in native form, showed that the Latin spirit was recovering from the first dominance of the Greek artistic form. In particular, it was during this time that the purely national satire received its permanent form and direction at the hands of Lucilius.
3. The Ciceronian Age, 83-43 B.C.— In this period, which is defined by the beginning and the end of Cicero's literary activity, Latin prose reached its culminating point, combining at last into a harmonious whole the earnestness of the Roman and something of Greek artistic skill. The practical national tendencies were still exemplified by Varro, who gave a long life to investigation and published works in many fields, in law, history, philosophy, gram mar and agriculture, with an almost exclusive attention to the matter rather than to the style. In history Sallust may be called the first of Roman historians, in the true sense of the word as distinguished from the annalists and antiqua rians, but his style is intentionally archaic and not wholly natural. The period was especially rich also in political writings, in the form of biographies and memoirs, among which must be included the commentaries of Caesar, historical in form, but written for a political purpose, and models of perfectly simple narrative in the pur est diction. But the chief figure in the litera ture of the period was Cicero. He was a man of wide knowledge both of the earlier Roman oratory and of Greek rhetoric; he was equally interested in the theory and in the practice of public speaking, and his warmth of tempera ment and purity of taste in composition made him an eminent master of style. His writings have remained since his time the models and standard of Latin prose. Aside from his speeches, of which some 50 are extant, he left valuable works on rhetoric, some well-written treatises on philosophy and a large and ex tremely interesting collection of letters, gathered and published after his death by his secretary.
In poetry also this period was second only to the Augustan Age. Lucretius, continuing the tradition of didactic poetry, wrote in hexam eters an exposition of the atomic theory of Epicurus. The subject was in itself unsuited to poetry, but Lucretius has so infused into it his own moral earnestness and so interspersed and adorned the doctrines with passages of lofty beauty that the work is intensely Roman and is undoubtedly the greatest didactic poem in existence. In lyric poetry Catullus left be
hind him at his early death a few score of poems, almost all quite short and some of them overwrought with imagery and allusion in the Alexandrian manner, but of the purest lyric strain and in this one respect superior to the of Horace. If the fame of Catullus rested on the (Attis) alone he would be called a great poet.
4. The Augustan Age, 43 B.C. to 14 A.D. This period was, in contrast to the preceding, mainly an age of poetry. The loss of political freedom affected unfavorably both the public oratory and the political and historical prose. Scarcely an orator of the period has left more than an empty name and public speakingg sank into declamation and rhetorical display. In his tory there is the one great name of Livy, but even he, though a friend of Augustus, found in the history of the past a kind of refuge from the political hopelessness of his own time. His style, in the narrower sense, was an adaptation of the periodic sentence structure of Cicero to the purpose of narrative, to which it is not en tirely suited, but his descriptions — his 'epic tured page"— are wonderfully vivid. From him and from Plutarch's 'Lives> most of our popular conceptions of Roman history and character are derived.
But the conditions which were unfavorable to the highest kinds of prose composition fos tered production in the unemotional and imper sonal fields of technical writing. To this per iod belong the work of Vitruvius on archi tecture, the extremely learned work of Verrius Flaccus on lexicography and grammar, now unfortunately lost, and some important writers on law. It was, however, in poetry of high quality that the age was especially productive. Virgil, after some imitations of Theocritus and a very perfectly finished poem on farming, left behind him at his death the tiEneid) in almost complete form, to become at once the great epic of Rome and in later times the most widely known of Latin poems. Horace, a Republican in his youth, who had fought at Pharsalus, continued the tradition of satire after the man ner of Lucilius and wrote the four books of the (Odes,) inferior to the poems of Catullus in lyric feeling, but superior in their attitude toward life and perhaps in their close stylistic texture. He also became at once a classic and has been the favorite poet of many men of society and of affairs. Tibullus and Propertius introduced elegiac poetry and seem in this field to have surpassed their Greek models. Ovid wrote a long poem embodying Greek myths, an account of the festivals of the Roman calendar and a number of minor poems, all with an unrivaled technical skill; but he was a man of weak fibre and lacking in genuineness and his personal failings have lowered the tone of his writings.