Taken all together, this roll of names, though no one of them is quite of the very highest rank, entitles the Augustan Age to a place among. the great periods of •literary production.
The. Ciceronian and Augustan periods are sometimes put together and called the Classical Period, or, in contrast with that which follows, the Golden Age of Latin Literature.
5. The Silver Latin, characteristics mark the literature of the early empire. On the one hand, technical skill in the craft of writing was never greater nor more generally exercised. Verse-composition was common and the versification was accurate and finished. But, on the other hand, the in creasing tyrannies of Tiberius, Caligula, Nero and Domitian suppressed independence of ut terance and even of thought and the decrease in race-vigor weakened the nobler impulses to expression. Technical skill was therefore put to frivolous or ignoble uses and was directed by petty vanities into mere affectation, instead of being controlled by a reserved taste and a sober purpose. Poetry borrowed the rhetorical devices of prose and prose used the vocabulary of poetry.
But while this description is fairly appli cable to most of the writers of this and the succeeding period, there were not a few writers who, though they were inevitably affected by the character of their times, were yet raised by interest in their subject or by refinement of taste almost to the level of the Classical Period. This was true in a measure of many of the writers on technical subjects, grammar, agricul ture, medicine, law; such, for example, was the elder Pliny, who collected a sort of compendium of knowledge in his Historia.) The philosopher and poet Seneca has been at times highly esteemed, but it is difficult to acquit him of insincerity and his closet-dramas betray his tendency to bombast. Quintilian, however, was a great teacher of rhetoric in the best sense and a writer of learning and taste, who would have been distinguished in any age. With him 'nay be ranked, though on different grounds, the younger Pliny; the collection of his letters was made by himself and the letters were doubtless written for publication, so that they lack (ex cept the correspondence with the Emperor Tra jan) the interest of Cicero's letters, but Pliny was a man of excellent taste and of creditable aspirations and his character as revealed in his correspondence is distinctly attractive. The
greatest prose writer of the period was Tacitus, the historian. He had endured and been em bittered by enduring the dreadful oppressions of Domitian's rule and under the liberal reign of Nerva and Trajan he used his opportunity to write truthful and independent histories of the empire. His style is individual and difficult from its condensation, but better suited to his subject than the Ciceronian periods would • have been and his treatment of his theme, though not tree from prejudice, is extremely powerful. Herodotus and Thucydides in Greek and Livy and Tacitus in Latin are the four great histo rians of the ancient world.
On the side of poetry, though there were many writers of some merit, only a few deserve mention here. Martial composed epigrams, Lucian wrote an epic of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, and. Persius and Juvenal were satirists. The latter is, in spite of rhetor ical blemishes and a repellant savageness of tone, one of the greatest writers in Latin litera ture and his satire has been the model for much writing of the same kind in English literature.
6. The Later writers after the end of the first century of our era few are of importance from.the strictly literary point of view and is a certain justice in closing the history of Latin literature with Tacitus. But in the long list of writers of the next four or five centuries there are many whose works have, apart from their form, an intrinsic in terest, in some cases a very great interest. From them may be selected the following names: In history, Suetonius, Ammianus and the Historim Augusta:' ; .in literary commentary and criticism, Gellius, Donatus Servius and Macrobius; in grammar, Marius Victorinus and Priscian. The most original and perhaps in a true sense literary work of these centuries is to be found in the legal writings, from Gaius to the 'Code of Justinian,) and in the Church Fathers, Lactantius, Ambrosius, Jerome, Augustine and many others; in writers of both of these classes interest in the subject checked the prevalent inclination to regard the art of writing as an end in itself rather than as a means.