Latin literature: a history

This authoritative history of Latin literature offers a comprehensive survey of the thousand-year period from the origins of Latin as a written language to the early Middle Ages. At once a reference work, a bibliographic guide, a literary study, and a reader's handbook, Latin Literature: A History is the first work of its kind to appear in English in nearly four decades.

From the first examples of written Latin through Gregory of Tours in the sixth century and the Venerable Bede in the seventh, Latin Literature offers a wide-ranging panorama of all major Latin authors. Including names, dates, edition citations, and detailed summaries, the work combines the virtues of an encyclopedia with the critical intelligence readers have come to expect from Italy's leading Latinist, Gian Biagio Conte. Many of the entries - those on Virgil and Petronius, for example - provide elegantly compact formulations of work on the very frontier of current study, and virtually all entries offer something of interest for the lay reader and expert alike.

Translation of: Letteratura latina.

Introduction: literary history and historiography -- Part I. The early and middle republics -- The origins -- The early roman theater -- Livius Andronicus -- Naevius -- Plautus -- Caecilius Statius -- Oratory and historiography in the archaic period -- Literature and culture in the period of the conquests -- Ennius -- Cato -- Terence -- The development of tragedy: Pacuvius and Accius -- The development of epic poetry: from Ennius to Virgil -- Lucilius -- Politics and culture between the era of the Gracchi and the Sullan restoration -- Part II. The late republic -- The age of Caesar (78-44 B.C.) -- Neoteric poetry and Catullus -- Lucretius -- Cicero -- Philology, biography, and antiquarianism at the end of the republic -- Caesar -- Sallust -- Part III. The age of Augustus -- 43 B.C. -- A.D. 17: Characteristics of a period -- Virgil -- Horace -- Elegy: Tibullus and Propertius -- Ovid -- Livy -- Directions in historiography -- Scholarship and technical disciplines -- Legal literature: from its beginnings to the early empire.

Part IV. The early empire -- Culture and spectacle: the literature of the early empire -- Seneca -- The poetic genres in the Julio-Claudian period -- Lucan -- P…