LATIN LITERATURE

Literature of ancient Rome, and of much of western Europe through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, written in the LATIN LANGUAGE, (q.v.).

The Latin Tradition.

Latin literature first appeared in the 3d century bc; its tradition has continued, in various forms, down to the present. The disintegration of the Roman Empire (see ROME, HISTORY OF.) and the gradual development of the Romance languages out of Vulgar Latin (the nonliterary language of the general populace) did not for centuries affect Latin’s position as the preeminent literary language of western Europe. Latin literature, in a Christianized form, continued to develop during the Middle Ages, when Latin served as the official language of the Roman Catholic church. With the rise of Renaissance humanism in the 14th century and its emphasis on reviving the classical forms of the ancient world came a new burst of creativity in Latin, which lasted into the 17th century. Until recent times, in Western culture, knowledge of classical Latin (as well as Greek) literature was basic to a liberal education.

Characteristics of Latin Literature.

The literature of Rome was itself modeled on GREEK LITERATURE, (q.v.) and served in turn as the basic model, especially in the Renaissance, for the development of later European literatures. Because of their close formal dependence on Greek models, Roman writers were concerned with emphasizing the specifically Roman quality of their experience; perhaps most important, almost all Roman writers had to come to terms with Rome’s civilizing mission in the world. The greatest accomplishments of Roman literature are found in epic and LYRIC, (q.v.) poetry, rhetoric, history, comic drama, and satire—the last genre being the only literary form the Romans invented.

Early Period.

Latin literature began with Livius Andronicus Lucius, who came to Rome as a Greek-speaking slave. He translated Homer’s epic the Odyssey into Latin verse and wrote the first dramas in Latin as well as translations of Greek plays. The first native Roman writer was Gnaeus Naevius (c. 270–c. 201 bc), who followed the example of Livius Andronicus. His comedies were especially successful, and he also composed the Bellum Poenicum, an epic poem on the First Punic War fought between Rome and its rival, Carthage. The first really important Roman writer, however, was Quintus Ennius, famous for his Annales, a vigorous and energetic poem telling the story of Rome and its conquests in hexameter lines successfully adapted from Greek into Latin. Ennius’s pioneering work served as the prototype for Roman epic and was affectionately imitated by later poets who refined his rugged style.

Only scattered fragments remain of the works of these earliest writers, but 21 plays of the first true genius in Roman literature, the comic writer Plautus, are extant. Comedy was Rome’s most effective contribution to the development of drama; the lively and robust plays of Plautus served as a model for much subsequent European comedy and have been performed and imitated into modern times. Plautus’s world of benighted masters, wily slaves, innocent maidens, and young men hopelessly and absurdly in love was taken over by the second Roman comic genius, Terence. Terence’s plays are smoother and more graceful than those of his predecessor, less boisterously funny but perhaps more touching.

The statesman Cato the Elder, a political conservative and the implacable enemy of Carthage, was the earliest master of Roman prose. An effective orator, he provided the first models for Roman rhetoric. His treatise on farming, De Agri Cultura (c. 160 bc), still survives. The great master of SATIRE, (q.v.), a genre apparently invented by Ennius, was Gaius Lucilius, who gave it its standard form in which a sharply defined voice pokes ruthless fun at a wide range of human foolishness. Only fragments of Lucilius’s entertaining work have survived.

The Golden Age: Poetry.

The forerunner of the greatest age of Roman poetry was Lucretius, whose didactic poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) argues in eloquent verse that the gods do not intervene in human affairs. Catullus, the first great lyric poet in Latin, was inspired by Greek models. His longer poems are complex and learned, but more characteristic of him are the shorter lyrics, some of them pure and simple utterances of his love for a woman called Lesbia and for his dead brother, others characterized by the sharp and mordant wit of his invective directed against his political enemies. His intense, earnest voice has been a moving force in the history of the European lyric since the rediscovery of Catullus’s work in the early Renaissance.

Acknowledged the greatest of all Latin poets, in his own as well as in later times, was Vergil. Early in his career he wrote the Eclogues, ten elegant and moving pastoral poems that became lasting models of their kind. These were followed by his graceful poems on farm life, the Georgics. Vergil’s masterpiece, however, was the Aeneid, an epic poem telling how the Trojan hero Aeneas came to Italy to found the settlement out of which Rome arose. This complex poem, inspired by the work of Homer, is a marvel of balance, contrasting the desire for peace with the traditional reverence for military virtue. Each succeeding age has found in the Aeneid a message central to its own concerns.

The lyric tradition was continued by a galaxy of poets who are still read. Vergil’s friend Horace made himself the master of the ODE, (q.v.), skillfully adapting Greek meters into Latin in the service of his own graceful voice. His best poetry is informed with a spirit of detached amusement. The tradition of the love elegy, begun by Catullus, was continued in a gentle and wistful manner by Albius Tibullus (48?–19 bc). The last of the three books of poems attributed to him includes direct and affecting poems on love; these poems were written actually by his contemporary Sulpicia, however, and are the only poems extant by a Roman woman.

More dynamic and complex love elegies were written by Sextus Propertius, turbulent and restless records of his difficult affair with Cynthia. The elegiac tradition was concluded by the work of Ovid, who treated the form in a playful manner. A voluminous poet, Ovid is best known for his Ars Amatoria, an ironic handbook on love, and his greatest work, the Metamorphoses, a long, loosely woven poem retelling ancient myths in graceful and melancholy tones.

The Golden Age: Prose.

Corresponding to the Golden Age of Roman poetry was an age of equal achievement in prose. The leading figure was Cicero, a statesman and orator whose resonant and sonorous rhetoric became the model for later European oratory. The best known of Cicero’s speeches are the slashing orations against the political conspirator Catiline, but many others are equally effective in the consummate care with which the rhythms and cadences of the Latin language are orchestrated to achieve decisive and persuasive effects. Cicero excelled as well in prose works of a more relaxed style, treatises on rhetoric and philosophical works, such as the famous pieces on friendship and on old age. Much of his extensive and revealing correspondence also exists.

Equally well known as a prose writer was Cicero’s contemporary Gaius Julius Caesar. His clear and forceful commentaries on the Gallic and civil wars (De Bello Gallico and De Bello Civili) have also become models of their kind, known to generations of beginning Latin students. The outstanding Roman historian was Livy, who wrote a lengthy history of Rome, Ab Urbe Condita Libri (From the Founding of the City), only about a fourth of which survives. It still serves as a basic source for the period.

The Silver Age.

The Golden Age was followed by what is often called the Silver Age of Latin literature, in the 1st century ad; although it was overshadowed by the brilliance of the preceding century, a substantial body of accomplished work was produced during this time. Vergil’s Aeneid seemed so much the perfection of the epic genre that subsequent epic poets were more hampered than helped by his example. Effective use of the epic tradition, however, was made by Lucan, whose Pharsalia treats incidents of the Roman civil war in an animated style, and by Publius Papinius Statius (c. 40–c. 96), a writer much admired in the Middle Ages. The Thebais (c. 91), Statius’s major work, is an energetic and loosely organized epic that pushes each feature of Vergilian style to its extreme. A dominant figure of the silver age was Seneca, the tutor of the notorious emperor Nero. Seneca expounded the doctrines of the Stoic philosophy in letters and treatises that had great influence, and he wrote a series of grisly tragedies that over the centuries have thrilled and horrified European dramatic sensibilities.

Interesting work was done in this period in various satiric modes. The slave Phaedrus (c. 15 bc–c. ad 50), who became a freeman under the emperor Augustus, produced Latin verse versions of the popular fables of the Greek writer Aesop. Perhaps the most original writer of his time was the urbane Petronius Arbiter, whose astonishing Satyricon (c. 60), a vast work in verse and prose of which only a part is extant, is a powerfully entertaining narrative vividly depicting a wide range of human excess. Vivid writing is a feature also of the great writers of verse satire, the harsh and difficult Persius and the bitter and cranky—but entertaining—Juvenal. That shortest of poetic forms, the epigram, was perfected by Martial, whose spicy and witty verses are models for their genre.

The prose of the first century ad includes the work of a number of noteworthy didactic writers. Pliny the Elder was a prolific writer whose Historia Naturalis remained a standard encyclopedic natural history textbook for generations. The Institutio Oratoria (c. 95) of the rhetorician Quintilian is an equally authoritative study; devoted to the theory and practice of oratory, it includes some of the most judicious Roman literary criticism. Several outstanding historians also wrote during this period. Cornelius Tacitus dramatically narrated the events of his age and the one preceding it in his Historiae (104–09) and Annales (c. 115–17); he also wrote a famous description of Germany and its inhabitants, Germania (c. 98). De Vita Caesarum (c. 121) by Suetonius is famous for its animated biographies of the Caesars and its often lurid depiction of what is for modern readers the most sensational period of Roman history.

Late Period.

During the subsequent centuries of the Roman Empire literature declined along with the political fortunes of the empire, but a few important figures emerged. The Metamorphoses (often called in translation The Golden Ass) of Lucius Apuleius is an entertaining prose narrative that includes the elegantly recounted story of Cupid and Psyche. A final burst of pagan literary energy occurred in the 4th century, with the learned and discerning Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius (fl. about 400) producing a sort of summary of ancient culture in his Saturnalia.

Early Christian Writing.

The first period of Christian literature in Latin overlaps that of later pagan writing. The first important Christian writer was Tertullian, a master of prose. One of the most influential Christian writers of his time was the church father St. Ambrose, whose correspondence is still read with interest, and who is also important for his hymns. A new tradition of Christian poetry, using pagan literary devices for Christian purposes, was inaugurated by Aurelius Clemens Prudentius (348–c. 405), whose Psychomachia (Battle of the Soul) pioneered the use of allegory in Christian poetry.

Two church fathers dominate early Christian prose: St. Jerome and St. Augustine. The major accomplishment of St. Jerome was his translation of the Bible. Known as the Vulgate, it has been the standard Latin version ever since, and its influence on subsequent Latin—and European—prose was enormous. St. Augustine was one of the most influential of all European thinkers. His major works, De Civitate Dei (The City of God, 413–26) and the highly personal Confessions (c. 400), use the classic style of Ciceronian rhetoric in an individual and moving way to express a sense of Christian conviction. Other products of this age, not specifically Christian in their orientation, had an immense influence on subsequent Christian thought. De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, c. 400) is the title popularly given to a curious allegorical work by Martianus Minneus Felix Capella (fl. about 400–39); it provided a way for European Christian culture to organize the secular knowledge it considered worthwhile. De Consolatione Philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy), by the consul Boethius, calmly and masterly depicts the way in which the life of the mind can be a source of inner peace in harrowing times.

Latin Literature of the Middle Ages.

Medieval Latin literature continues the tradition of early Christian literature. St. Isidore of Seville produced a compendium of the culture of his time in his 20 books of Etymologies (623), which served the later Middle Ages as a standard reference work. History writing, some of it still interesting from a literary point of view as well, was also an important part of the literature of this period. In 731 the Englishman St. Bede the Venerable, who also wrote Latin verse, completed an invaluable ecclesiastical history of his homeland. The most admired prose work of its time was the authoritative life of Charlemagne by the Frankish scholar Einhard.

A noteworthy group of poets gathered at the court of Charlemagne. Chief among them was the English scholar Alcuin and the learned archbishop of Mainz Rabanus Maurus (c. 780–856), who may have written the magnificent hymn “Veni Creator Spiritus” (Come, Creator Spirit). This was also an age of interesting developments in liturgical poetry. The form known as the sequence—Latin chants sung during the Mass—developed in the 9th century; it is particularly associated with Notker Balbulus (c. 840–912) of the Abbey of Saint Gall.

Longer poems of several kinds were also a feature of the early Middle Ages. The story of REYNARD THE FOX, (q.v.), a beast fable, found its way into Latin verse in the 10th century. More serious epics were written, as well. Especially impressive is the heroic poem Waltharius, attributed to the Swiss monk Ekkehard I the Elder (c. 910–73), based on the life of King Walter of Aquitaine.

Much of the best Latin poetry of the Middle Ages was anonymous, especially the secular lyric verse ascribed to wandering scholars (goliards) celebrating the joys of drinking and of fleshly love, and satirizing the clergy and traditional devotional poetry. These anonymous poems, loosely called goliardic, exist in a number of manuscripts, the best-known collection being the Carmina Burana, assembled in Bavaria in the 13th century. Religious poetry also continued to be written; outstanding examples are the moving sequence, also used as a hymn, the “Stabat Mater Dolorosa” (Sorrowfully His Mother Stood) of Jacopone da Todi (c. 1230–1306) and the powerful “Dies Irae” (Day of Wrath) of the Italian friar Thomas of Celano (1200?–55?).

A considerable number of medieval Latin religious plays are extant; these are the direct ancestors of modern drama. Developed in the context of liturgical services, they include the forms known as MIRACLE, MYSTERY, AND MORALITY PLAYS, (q.v.). The German nun Hrosvitha adapted the dramatic techniques of Terence to Christian themes with curious results; other than her work, however, most of this drama is anonymous.

Prose fiction was a popular type of Latin literature, mostly in the form of short tales, such as the widely read 13th-century collections known as the Gesta Romanorum (Deeds of the Romans). The Legenda Aurea (Golden Legend), a collection of lives of the saints by the archbishop of Genoa Jacobus de Voragine (c. 1230–98), was also popular.

Latin served as the intellectual language of Europe throughout this period, and extant is a vast body of specialized prose, such as Scholastic philosophy, the concern of which is not primarily literary. Some philosophers, however, such as the French scholar Peter Abelard, also produced work of literary merit. His love poems are lost, but his hymns and his intense and affecting correspondence with his beloved Hélo•se (c. 1098–1164) remain. Two important works of the learned poet Alain de Lille (c. 1128–1202), the Anticlaudianus and the De Planctu Naturae (The Complaint of Nature), are allegorical and philosophical attempts to work out the place of human beings in terms of God’s plan for the natural universe; they are also of intrinsic literary interest. Even as writers began to use vernacular languages for more purposes, technical treatises continued to be written in Latin. The great Italian poet Dante Alighieri used the Latin language eloquently in treatises on the role of the monarchy (De Monarchia) and on the uses of the Italian language (De Vulgari Eloquentia).

Latin Literature of the Renaissance.

The last great age of creativity in Latin, the Renaissance, was ushered in by the work of the Italian humanist Petrarch in the 14th century. Humanism was a movement that aimed to re-create classical experience by reviving the language, style, and genres of Roman literature. Petrarch’s most accomplished work in Latin includes his self-interrogating Secretum (1343), as well as an extensive correspondence in fluent prose and verse. The tradition of humanistic prose in Italy was carried on by such writers as Poggio, who is noteworthy for a lively history of contemporaneous Florence and for his Facetiae (1438–52), a collection of amusing tales.

Latin continued to be the technical and intellectual language of Europe in the Renaissance. The linguistic studies of the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla (1407–57) paved the way for future scholarship and greatly influenced Renaissance thought and literary style. Important for literature were the philosophical writings of Marsilio Ficino, who tried to reconcile Platonism and Christianity, and of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, known for his De Hominis Dignitate Oratio (Oration on the Dignity of Man, 1486).

Concurrent with the flowering of Latin prose in Renaissance Italy was an enormous production of verse notable for its polish and expressiveness. The best of the poets was Giovanni Pontano (1426–1503), whose elegant, moving work combines erotic feeling and a strong sense of family life. A Greek exile, Michael Marullus (1453–1500), wrote forceful Latin hymns to the pagan gods, and the Florentine humanist Politian wrote poetry in Latin as gracefully as in Italian. The work of Marco Girolamo Vida (c. 1485–1566) includes an influential verse treatise on the art of poetry, Ars Poetica; his Christiad (1535) comes perhaps the closest to a successful Renaissance epic in Latin.

Northern Europe was also the scene of excellent work in Latin, carrying on the tradition begun in Italy. Enormously important was the Dutch humanist scholar Erasmus, whose vast production includes his entertaining Encomium Moriae (The Praise of Folly, 1509). Erasmus’s friend the English statesman Sir Thomas More wrote a Latin visionary work, Utopia (1516), that is still central to Western political thought. The best-known Renaissance Latin novel is the Argenis (1621) of the Scottish poet and satirist John Barclay (1582–1621); a satire on European politics, it was translated in 1623 by the English poet Ben Jonson. George Buchanan (1506–82), the foremost Scottish humanist, was resonant and eloquent in a broad range of Latin verse and drama. Among the most widely read European love poems in Latin were the passionate Basia (Kisses) of the Dutch writer Johannes Secundus (1511–36). The Welsh writer John Owen (c. 1563– 1622) was famous for his pithy Latin epigrams.

The tradition of Latin poetry in northern Europe lasted into the 17th century. Two Jesuit poets, Casimir Sarbiewski of Poland (1595–1640) and Jacob Balde (1604–68) of Alsace, wrote impressive Horatian poetry on Christian subjects. The last major European writer to use Latin as a primary means of poetic expression was the young John Milton. The great English poet wrote much Latin prose as well, in his capacity as Latin secretary of the Commonwealth in 1649. F.J.N., FRED J. NICHOLS, M.A., Ph.D.