Many poets and prose writers were active in the late republic and the principate, and scholars of literature later judged their work to be of such high quality that they called the period from about 50 B.C.E. to 20 C.E. the “golden age” of Latin literature. Roman poets and prose writers celebrated the physical and emotional joys of a comfortable life. Their works were highly polished, elegant in style, and intellectual in conception. Roman poets referred to the gods often and treated mythological themes, but the core subject matter of their work was human, not divine.

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 violence of rural life. In vivid language Virgil depicts the death of one of the bulls pulling a plow and the farmer unyoking the remaining animal:

Virgil’s masterpiece is the Aeneid (uh-NEE-ihd), an epic poem that is the Latin equivalent of the Greek Iliad and Odyssey (see “Homer, Hesiod, and the Epic” in Chapter 3). Virgil’s account of the founding of Rome and the early years of the city gave final form to the legend of Aeneas, the Trojan hero (and ancestor of Romulus and Remus) who escaped to Italy at the fall of Troy:

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 parallels 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. Therefore, Augustus encouraged Virgil to write the Aeneid and made sure it was circulated widely immediately after Virgil died.

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. After Augustus’s victory Horace returned to Rome and became Virgil’s friend. His most important works are a series of odes, short lyric poems often focusing on a single individual or event. One of these commemorated Augustus’s victory over Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 B.C.E. Horace depicted Cleopatra as a frenzied queen, drunk with desire to destroy Rome, a view that has influenced opinions about Cleopatra until today.

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. Livy’s history of Rome, titled simply Ab Urbe Condita (From the founding of the city), began with the legend of Aeneas and ended with the reign of Augustus. Livy used the works of earlier Greek and Roman writers, as well as his own experiences, as his source material.

Augustus actively encouraged poets and writers, but he could also turn against them. 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. (See “Primary Source 6.2: Ovid, The Art of Love.”) This work was so popular, Ovid relates, that shortly afterward he felt compelled to write The Cure for Love, advising people how to fall out of love and forget their former lovers. Have lots of new lovers, it advises, and don’t hang around places, eat foods, or listen to songs that will make you remember your former lover. 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, and others say it was because the poet knew about political conspiracies. Whatever its causes, the exile of Ovid became a symbol of misunderstood poetic genius for many later writers.