came into consideration.
The unthinking respect for Greek as the common mark of learning is proved, perversely enough, by the way Greek learning was often dismissed or played down for rhetorical effect. Where Greek was concerned, Romans always felt they had something to prove. The historian Sallust made C. Marius, a populist general in the second and first centuries BC, stress his lack of book-learning, hence Greek: “My words are not refined: I don’t care. True character displays itself quite well enough; those others will be needing technical finesse, as a way for words to disguise their chicanery. Nor did I learn to read and write Greek: there was no point in learning it, since it did no good to the prowess of the people who teach it.”25
And before there was any Latin literature to speak of, Marcus Cato the Censor had set the tone for Helleno-skeptic Romans. Though on a diplomatic mission of some delicacy—when in 191 he needed to persuade his audience to support Rome rather than the Greek emperor Antiochus—he deliberately chose to address the Athenians in Latin, speaking in tandem with an interpreter although he knew Greek himself: “The Athenians, he says, admired the quickness and vehemence of his speech; for an interpreter would be very long in repeating what he had expressed with a great deal of brevity; on the whole he professed to believe that the words of the Greeks came only from their lips, whilst those of the Romans came from their hearts.”26
Yet this was the same man who, while on campaign in Sardinia, had discovered the poet Ennius; by bringing him back to teach and write at Rome as its first “national” poet, Cato did as much as anyone to set Latin literature into its Greek tracks. Cato, however, also went on personally to found Latin prose literature, with a treatise on running a farm (DE AGRI CVLTVRA), and another—his masterwork, though unfinished and now lost—on Roman history (ORIGINES), which was composed from 168 to his death in 149.
A century later, in summing up the early Greek-bound history of Latin literature, Cicero—who was to become its prose master—liked to emphasize the role of the circle of intellectuals who congregated at the house of Cato’s younger friend P. Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus.* Cicero, in his dialogues The Republic and Laelius on Friendship, imagines conversations among Scipio’s “flock,” which besides aristocratic politicians included Roman poets such as the satirist Lucilius† and the dramatist Terence, and Greek scholars such as the historian Polybius, and the open-minded Stoic philosopher Panaetius, who apparently commuted between Rome and Athens. But here is a typical remark of Scipio: “And so I ask you to listen to me: not as a complete expert on things Greek, nor as someone who prefers them to ours especially in this field, but as one of the political class with a decent education thanks to his father’s generosity, and one who has been burning with intellectual curiosity since boyhood, but who has nevertheless been much more enlightened by practice, and what he was taught at home, than by what he has read.”27
Marcus Tullius Cicero, the eternal doyen of classical prose, who, after a brilliant oratorical career, laid the foundation for Latin as a language for philosophy.
The stance is familiar. Even the most intellectual of Roman politicians were determined to keep their thinking in touch with common sense and (since they were Romans after all) the practice of their distinguished forebears. Nonetheless, they could not overlook that the source of so many interesting ideas was Greek.
Cicero,* whose own political career—to his great sadness—had coincided with the final collapse of traditional values in Roman politics, filled the enforced vacuum at the end of his professional career by writing. The task he set himself was to transmute Greek philosophy into a corpus of Latin works that would make sense to Romans. In so doing, he found himself struggling to give Latin some means of expressing abstractions. The word qualitas, for example, is one of the technical terms Cicero invented, turning up here for the first time in his Academic Questions:
“… they called it body and something like quality (‘how-ness’). You will certainly allow us in these unusual cases sometimes to use words that are novel, as the Greeks themselves do who have long been discussing them.”
“As far as we’re concerned,” said Atticus, “go ahead and use Greek terms when you want, if your Latin fails you.” Varro replied, “You’re very kind: but I’ll endeavour to speak in Latin, except for words like philosophy or rhetoric or physics or dialectic, which along with many others are already customary in place of Latin words. So I have called qualities what the Greeks call poiotētas, which even among Greeks is not a word for ordinary people but philosophers, as often. In fact, the logicians have no ordinary words: they use their own.”28
In such works, Cicero ensured that, just like Greek, the Latin literary tradition would progress from classic works in verse (dramatic especially) to classics of artistic prose, in oratory and philosophy. Of course, he was not alone as a writer in the late Republic; but the copyists’ tradition has been kind to him, following the collective judgment of ancient schoolmasters on who was worth reading, and his work now largely stands alone in those fields, along with the historian Sallust (86–35), and Julius Caesar himself (100–44), who also wrote a kind of contemporary history, but of his own campaigns. There is also DE RERVM NATURA ‘On the Nature of Things’, an atheistic epic on science and paleontology written by Lucretius (ca 94–ca 52 BC).*
This corpus was supplemented in the next generation by a small number of poets and historians who were likewise to be selected as classic representatives of their art forms. Three of them were protégés of a single rich and exceedingly well-connected man, Augustus’ aide C. Maecenas: these were Virgil (70–19 BC), the doyen of epic poetry (as well as pastoral and didactic verse—although Virgil was always inclined to weave in political references); Horace (65–8 BC), of lyric poetry, as well as witty, topical verse; and Propertius (ca 50–ca 5 BC), of love elegies. Besides them there were the historian Livy (59 BC–AD 17), author of Ab Vrbe Condita ‘Since the Foundation of the City’, and the poet Ovid (43 BC–AD 17), mostly famous for the wide range of his wit, often on erotic themes. These were the masters of the Golden Age. To them—largely, in deference to later taste—three other love poets are usually added: C. Valerius Catullus (84–54 BC) who was marginally involved in politics in the era of Cicero and Caesar; Albius Tibullus (ca 52–19 BC), who was a friend of Horace’s and Ovid’s, and Sulpicia, the only extant woman poet of the classical era, whose poems have been preserved along with those of Tibullus. With these, the roll call of accepted Golden Age writers is essentially complete.†
Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil), Latin’s great epic poet. His apparent prophecy of a new age brought in by a virgin and child assured his later reputation among Christians.
In their separate ways, all but Catullus (who died too soon) needed to come to terms with the new dominance of Rome’s first emperor, Augustus. They were then amply rewarded for their optimistic view of the new regime: only Ovid fell foul of the government, but apparently because of a social or personal faux pas, rather than a false move in the political sphere.
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