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18962 results in Cambridge Histories

Page 894 of 949

  • 9 - The new direction in poetry

  • from PART III - LATE REPUBLIC
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 178-206

  • Summary

    In 50 BC Cicero begins a letter to Atticus with a playful reference to a mannerism of the New Poets, the spondaic hexameter. The spondaic hexameter is as old as Homer, but in Homer infrequent and casual. In the Hellenistic poets, Aratus, Callimachus, Apollonius, Euphorion, and odiers, and in their Latin imitators it becomes frequent and designed. The New Poets were a group of young and impressionable poets in the generation after Cicero's who shared a literary attitude relating even to stylistic minutiae, of which Cicero chose to notice two. They wished to change Latin poetry, and to a considerable extent they succeeded in their purpose. The Marriage of Peleus and Thetis is Catullus' longest and most ambitious poem, undoubtedly his intended masterpiece. The subject of the poem, home-coming, is likely to occasion diffuse sentiment. Catullus' delight is exactly reflected in the wit and complicated play, the happiness, of his language.

  • 30 - Minor poetry

  • from PART V - EARLY PRINCIPATE
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 624-632

  • Summary

    Phaedrus stands apart from the main stream of Augustan and post-Augustan poetry. Phaedrus' language is generally plain and commonplace, occasionally coarse. He admits colloquial and prosaic terms avoided by most of the poets. Like Publilius, he can point a memorable phrase. The eclogues of Calpurnius originate perhaps from a single literary coterie, centred upon the patron represented as Meliboeus in Calp 1 and 4. Enthusiasm about a new golden age, evinced both by Calpurnius and the Einsiedeln poet, links these writers together and accords with other evidence for the optimism and sense of revival which seem to have marked Nero's accession to power. Calpurnius is overshadowed by Theocritus and Virgil, who provided his main inspiration. Calpurnius' book of eclogues has an intentionally patterned structure: the first, central, and concluding poems relate to the real world around him, while the others stand, ostensibly apart from their present circumstances.

  • 41 - Minor figures

  • from PART VI - LATER PRINCIPATE
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 770-773

  • Summary

    Astrology was believed in and practised by all classes in the Late Empire. Julius Firmicus Maternus defends astrology against sceptical criticism and alleges that he was the first to introduce the science to Rome. Maternus' vocabulary includes many late Latin words such as concordialis, mansuetarius, quiescentia, and he is particularly fond of intimare. Arnobius uses a wide-ranging vocabulary, including many archaisms and poetic words, and often piles synonym upon synonym for the same idea. As a display of rhetorical pyrotechnics his treatise has few rivals. As a serious contribution to its declared subject its value is negligible. It is noteworthy that his style is very different from the sober, rather dull Ciceronianism of the contemporary Gaulish orators whose speeches survive in the Panegyrici Latini. Perhaps the influence of Apuleius and Tertullian was still strong in their native land.

  • 35 - Introductory

  • from PART VI - LATER PRINCIPATE
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 681-691

  • Summary

    This chapter explores the period that extends roughly from the middle of the third century to the middle of the fifth century AD. The period, that of Diocletian and Constantine saw the re-establishment of firm central power in the empire on a new basis. By Constantine's death stability had been restored in the military, administrative and economic spheres. Literature and art began to find patrons and the pen began to replace the sword as an instrument of persuasion. The period, in the first half of the fifth century, saw the political separation between the eastern and western parts of the Roman empire, which had been a temporary expedient in the past, become permanent. Christian writers, with their essentially historical view of the world, were more sensitive to the signs of change than the pagan contemporaries. Augustine's City of God in its way marks the end of the ancient world in the west as clearly as do the great barbarian invasions.

  • 11 - Cicero and the relationship of oratory to literature

  • from PART III - LATE REPUBLIC
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 230-267

  • Summary

    Marcus Tullius Cicero has been endlessly studied as a character and as a politician, and certainly these aspects of him are of absorbing interest; but his chief historical importance is as a man of letters. Hellenistic criticism recognized three styles, the grand, middle and plain. Not only higher education but literature in general at Rome was founded on oratory. Cicero in the Orator associated these with the three aims of oratory, to move, to please and to convince respectively. The grand style was forceful, weighty, spacious, emotional and ornate, carrying men away: it was what is understood by rhetorical. The ambition to be an orator probably came to the boy from the hill-town of Arpinum, south-east of Rome, through his being entrusted by his father to the care of Rome's leading orator, Lucius Crassus. The nature of Roman legal procedure promotes Cicero's oratorical development.

  • 31 - Prose satire

  • from PART V - EARLY PRINCIPATE
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 633-638

  • Summary

    For sparkle and malicious with few works of Latin literature can match the only complete Menippean satire which has survived, a skit upon the life and death of Claudius Caesar ascribed in manuscripts which transmit it to Seneca. Transition from prose to verse, a distinctive feature of the Menippean genre, is aptly and amusingly contrived. In general frivolity prevails, but the praise of Nero can be taken seriously and, of course, many of the charges against Claudius, made by Augustus and elsewhere, are in themselves grave enough. Petronius' Satyrica, commonly known as Satyricon, raise abundant problems for literary historians and critics alike. Petronius presents the adventures of a hero, or anti-hero, Encolpius, a conventionally educated young man, without money or morals, and his catamite, Giton, handsome and unscrupulous. Both in incident and character Petronius' novel is highly realistic, indeed startlingly so, if compared with sentimental romances.

  • 27 - Lucan

  • from PART V - EARLY PRINCIPATE
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 533-557

  • Summary

    Lucan is a model for orators, not poets. Martial shows that prose and verse had become polarized that sense was now distinct from sensibility, when Quintilian records that Lucan, for many, had forfeited the name of poet: there were rules, and the rules were there to be followed. In the Bellum civile, Lucan began with tired neoteric essays, stylistically akin to those of the princeps, quite mainstream, and accomplished. Rhetoric may demand an increasing amount of anti-Caesarian invective, but that has no necessary bearing on Lucan's relations with the princeps. Lucan devoting too much space to moralization, and little, if any, to narrative; and his apotheosis at the beginning of Book 9 is too abstract to reflect on him as an individual. Rome had seen a good deal of civil war, and a literature had been adapted to the theme.

  • 1 - Books and readers in the Roman world

  • from PART I - READERS AND CRITICS
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 1-32

  • Summary

    For half a millennium the printed book has been the primary means of communicating ideas in the Western world. The history of Roman literature effectively begins with Ennius. Plautus in his comedies had reproduced his Greek models in metres in which the influence of native Latin verse is apparent. Roman educational institutions, predictably, follow Greek models. The casual and fluid nature of publication in the ancient world is described just as characteristic of what happened to books after publication. For educational and rhetorical purposes epitomes and abstracts were increasingly in vogue. Roman scholars took over the traditions of Alexandrian literary scholarship along with the rest of Hellenistic culture. From Virgil onwards Latin poetry was profoundly influenced by rhetoric, and a style of literary criticism that fails to take account of this fact will miss much that is essential to the poetry. Literary Latin was an artificial dialect, quite distinct from the spoken idiom.

  • 20 - Love elegy

  • from PART IV - THE AGE OF AUGUSTUS
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 405-419

  • Summary

    The elegiac distich appears as a fully developed poetic form in Greece in the seventh century BC. This chapter concentrates on the famous Augustan love-poets. The love elegy or the book of love elegies may be considered as a creation of the Augustan age, though Catullus is sometimes included. His poem would seem to represent the prototype of the Augustan love elegy though love is only one theme among many; it is interwoven most skilfully with the themes of friendship, the loss of his brother, the Trojan War. The elegiac poets of the Augustan age, beginning with Cornelius Gallus, write whole books of elegies. Albius Tibullus' friendship with the great statesman M. Valerius Messalla Corvinus is one of the main themes of his poetry. The Corpus Tibullianum may be considered an anthology of poems written by members of that circle, probably published after Messalla's death.

  • 4 - Ennius' Annales

  • from PART II - EARLY REPUBLIC
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 60-76

  • Summary

    This chapter focuses on an important bearing on the shape and unity of Ennius' Annales as a whole. The cult of the Muses was introduced by M. Fulvius Nobilior, who built a Templum Herculis Afusarum to house statues of Hercules Musageta and the Nine Sisters taken with much other booty from what had once been Pyrrhus' palace in Ambracia. The title of Ennius' poem looks immediately to the priestly Annales, yearbooks, instituted by the Pythagorean king Numa Pompilius and kept by the pontifices. Ennius has achieved the rapidity of Homer by using a mixture of dactyls and spondees quite different from that in his tree-felling passage, and by keeping Homer's enjambments, essential to the impetus of a passage describing great and uncontrolled natural forces at large. He is essentially un-Homeric in calling the South Wind spiritus Austri imbricitor, that is Hellenistic baroque.

  • 29 - Martial and Juvenal

  • from PART V - EARLY PRINCIPATE
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 597-623

  • Summary

    The beginning of Juvenal's literary career coincided with Martial's later years: the composition of the first satire, which contains a reference to the trial of Marius Priscus in AD 100 was probably contemporaneous with the epigrammatist's retirement to Spain. Juvenal, is less obedient to the rules of his genre and sometimes even anarchic, his language a medley of high and low, his tone contemptuous, and, in any normal sense of the words, unconstructive, negative. Martial never plays the fool, and never makes people think. He is poetic on occasions and the rules remain intact: even Quintilian, perhaps against his will, receives an epigram. Martial is Juvenal's senior, his work covers the twenty years which provided the satirist with the matter for much of his first two books, the twenty-year period during which the satirist still listened. The comparison with Martial's easy life in Spain would hardly be charitable, unless Juvenal's life in Rome were a figment taken from his poetry.

  • 26 - The Younger Seneca

  • from PART V - EARLY PRINCIPATE
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 511-532

  • Summary

    A generation after Seneca's suicide Quintilian composed his survey of Greek and Roman authors, classified by genres. All the authors in Quintilian's survey could be neatly slotted into a traditional genre; Seneca, alone, attempted almost all the genres. Seneca was no more free of extremes in his life than in his writings, and his biography is as dramatic in its vicissitudes as any in the story of Rome. Senecan prose stands to the prose of Cicero or Livy much as pointillism stands to the style of the Old Masters. The Appendix on the tragedies will show that the external evidence concerning Senecan tragedy is minimal, far less than exists for any other dramatic corpus of comparable importance in the history of European literature. Both in ancient and modern times Seneca's personal character has been vilified by some critics.

  • 22 - Livy

  • from PART IV - THE AGE OF AUGUSTUS
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 458-466

  • Summary

    Internal evidence suggests that Livy began to write his History of Rome in or shortly before 29 BC by which time Octavian, the later Augustus, had restored peace and a measure of stability to the Roman world. Historical activity had flourished at Rome for 200 years before Livy and the project of writing the complete history of the state was not a new one. Livy was, indeed, acquainted with Augustus, who called him a Pompeian, which implied a conservative independence of outlook and he acted as literary adviser to the future emperor Claudius but it is impossible to trace political motives in his writing. In interpreting history in terms of individuals, Livy was following very much in the Hellenistic tradition. Livy's language has been much studied and the publication of a complete Concordance has opened new doors for the appreciation of his verbal sensitivity.

  • 37 - Biography

  • from PART VI - LATER PRINCIPATE
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 723-731

  • Summary

    The form of imperial biography established in the second century by Suetonius continued to be followed during late antiquity, and was later adopted as a model by Einhard for his Life of Charlemagne. The Historia Augusta is a collection of lives of emperors from Hadrian to Numerian, dealing not only with reigning emperors, but with co-emperors and pretenders as well. There are thirty biographies in all, some dealing with groups of emperors or pretenders. They are addressed to Diocletian, Constantine and various personages of their period, and purport to have been written at various dates from before 305 till after 324. They are attributed to six authors: Aelius Spartianus, Julius Capitolinus, Vulcatius Gallicanus, Aelius Lampridius, Trebellius Pollio and Flavius Vopiscus. The Confessions were written about 397, in the early years of Augustine's episcopate of Hippo.

  • 39 - Oratory and epistolography

  • from PART VI - LATER PRINCIPATE
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 755-761

  • Summary

    The study of rhetoric and the practice of declamation went on throughout the half-century of military anarchy in the third century. Roman emperors had always spent a surprising proportion of their time listening to speeches made by representatives of the Senate and delegates of provinces and cities. Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, known also as Eusebius, belonged to one of the most distinguished senatorial families of Rome. Symmachus well knew that the epistolary genre calls for brevity and compression. Symmachus was the last great Roman orator in the classical tradition and the last senator whose correspondence was collected and published. But both oratory and epistolography found a new place in the life of the Christian church. The needs of Christian communication broke the narrow bounds within which classical epistolography flourished. In the same way the Christian sermon was a new form of oratory.

Page 894 of 949