Golden Age of Latin literature (1 gen 50 anni a. C. – 1 gen 20 anni)

Descrizione:

“Rome’s greatest poet was Virgil (70–19 B.C.E.), who drew on earlier traditions but gave them new twists. The Georgics, for example, is a poem about agriculture that used Hellenistic models to capture both the peaceful pleasures and the day-to-day harshness of rural life. Virgil’s masterpiece is the Aeneid (uh-NEE-ihd), an epic poem that is the Latin equivalent of the Greek Iliad and Odyssey.”

“As Virgil told it, Aeneas became the lover of Dido, the widowed queen of Carthage, but left her because his destiny called him to found Rome. Swearing the destruction of Rome, Dido committed suicide, and according to Virgil, her enmity helped cause the Punic Wars. In leaving Dido, an “Eastern” queen, Aeneas put duty and the good of the state ahead of marriage or pleasure. The resemblances between this story and the very recent real events involving Antony and Cleopatra were not lost on Virgil’s audience. Making the public aware of these parallels, and of Virgil’s description of Aeneas as an ancestor of Julius Caesar, fit well with Augustus’s aims. Augustus encouraged Virgil to write the Aeneid and made sure it was circulated widely immediately after Virgil died. It puts sexual relations as well as war at the center of the story of Rome, just as the founding myths of the rape of the Sabine women and the suicide of Lucretia had earlier”

“The poet Horace (65–8 B.C.E.) rose from humble beginnings to friendship with Augustus. The son of an ex-slave and tax collector, Horace nonetheless received an excellent education, which he finished in Athens. His most important works are a series of odes, short lyric poems often focusing on a single individual or event.”

“The historian Livy (59 B.C.E.–17 C.E.) was a friend of Augustus and a supporter of the principate. He especially approved of Augustus’s efforts to restore what he saw as republican virtues.”

“The poet Ovid (AH-vuhd) (43 B.C.E.–17 C.E.) wrote erotic poetry about absent lovers and the joys of seduction, as well as other works about religious festivals and mythology. His best-known work is The Art of Love, a satire of the serious instructional poetry that was common in Rome at the time. The Art of Love provides advice to men about how to get and keep women, and for women about how to get and keep men. This work was so popular, Ovid relates, that shortly after completing it he felt compelled to write The Cure for Love, advising people how to fall out of love and forget their former lovers…In 8 B.C.E. Augustus banished Ovid to a city on the Black Sea far from Rome. Why he did so is a mystery, and Ovid himself states only that the reason was “a poem and a mistake.” Some scholars argue that Augustus banished Ovid because his poetry celebrated adultery at a time when Augustus was promoting marriage and childbearing…”

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