![]() ![]() He then fell in love with a woman he styled as "Lesbia", who was almost certainly Clodia, the wife of a Roman aristocrat and sister of Julius Caesar’s supporter and agent. Spending much of his life in Rome, Catullus thrived in a sophisticated literary circle that admired and imitated the Greek poetry of Alexandria. In contrast to Lucretius, a great deal is known about Catullus from the many autobiographical passages in his poetry. The poem concludes with two practical applications-"live in secret" and "keep out of politics"-which purportedly point the way to true pleasure and the coveted "peace of mind". This worldview led Lucretius to the anti-supernatural results that the gods either do not exist or take no interest in human affairs and that religion is a malicious facade. Consequently, De Rerum maintains that only the atoms and the void in which they move are eternal. According to Lucretius’s interpretation, the aim of this philosophy was to reveal how to obtain peace of mind (Greek: ajtaraxiva) in difficult times.īased on his conviction that the world is made up of random combinations of atoms moving in a void, which yield all physical objects and (via the motions of the finer atoms of the soul) all mental processes and emotions, Lucretius argued that such combinations eventually separate, spelling the mortality of the material world and the soul. ![]() His purpose of his didactic poem De Rerum Natura (On the nature of things) was to convert the Roman aristocrat Memmius to Epicureanism. Little is known about Lucretius besides the years when he lived. While the silver age was surpassed by the magnificence of the preceding century, a considerable corpus of masterpieces were generated during this era by such authors as Seneca (4 b.c.e.–65 c.e.), Lucan (39–65 c.e.), Pliny the Elder (23–79 c.e.), Quintilian (35–95 c.e.), Statius (45–96 c.e.), Martial (40–104 c.e.), Tacitus (55–120 c.e.), Juvenal (60–130 c.e.), and Suetonius (69–140 c.e.).Įxerting a powerful infl uence on this age was the contemporary educational system based on letters and rhetoric, which inspired prospective writers with the treasures of Greek and Latin literature and systematically trained them in the art of declamation, influencing their proficiency in figures of speech, exclamations, apostrophes, interrogations, and an assortment of other literary devices. Politically, the golden age saw the final overthrow of the senatorial Republic (Latin: res publica) and the inauguration of a single monarch over the Roman state.ĭepending on the date of composition, therefore, its literature reflects one of three distinct themes: public oratory, characteristic of the speeches of Roman senators an uncontrollable anxiety stemming from the political unrest and civil wars between the assassination of Julius Caesar (44 b.c.e.) and the Battle of Actium (31 b.c.e) or the peace indicative of the reign of Augustus, which was undergirded by Epicureanism. The golden age has been so named by classical scholars because the greatest authors of the Roman Empire, including Lucretius (99–55 b.c.e.), Catullus (84–54 b.c.e.), Julius Caesar (100–44 b.c.e.), Cicero, Virgil (70–19 b.c.e.), Horace (65– 8 b.c.e.), Livy (59 b.c.e.–17 c.e.), and Ovid (43 b.c.e.–18 c.e.), flourished during this time. ![]() The Roman golden and silver ages represent the periods of Latin literature from the career of Cicero (106–43 b.c.e.) to the death of Augustus Caesar (14 c.e.) and from the beginning of Tiberius’s reign as Roman emperor (14 c.e.) to the close of Hadrian’s reign (138 c.e.), respectively. ![]()
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