Latin Literature

A concise history traces the development of Latin literary expression from its earliest epic and tragic fragments through Republican comedy, satire, and prose, into the Augustan flowering of epic and lyric, and onward to the diverse writings of the imperial and late antique periods. Arranged by chronological periods and genres, it surveys representative poets and prose-writers, major works and stylistic shifts, and questions of textual transmission and manuscript survival. Chapters treat lyric and elegiac verse, rhetoric and historiography, satire and the Silver Age, as well as the emergence of Christian Latin and the gradual transition toward medieval literary forms.