The Golden Age was from the First century BC to the First century AD – it is the period of Classical Latin, the Latin which is considered as standard. Three of the main poets of this period were Catullus (Gaius Valerius Catullus) (Ca. 84-Ca. 54 BC), Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) (70–19 BC), and Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) (43 BC-AD 17). The most famous of these are Virgil, Author of the Aeneid, and Ovid, who wrote the Metamorphoses. Of the prose writers of the Golden Age, Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero) (106 –43 BC), a great orator, stands out.
Catullus
Caius Valerius Catullus was a Roman poet from Verona who was often called by later writers as Catullus of Verona (Catullus Veronensis). The dates of his birth and death cannot be established with certainty. It is approximated from a study of his works that he must have been born in 84 B.C. and died ca. 54 B.C. Catullus came from a prominent and wealthy Veronese family and his father was a friend of Caesar’s. He fell deeply in love, probably with Clodia, sister of Cicero’s opponent Publius Clodius, who was suspected of murdering her husband. Catullus wrote to his beloved, addressed as Lesbia, a series of superb little poems that run from early passion and tenderness to the hatred and disillusionment that overwhelmed him after his mistress was faithless. The chief events of his life were his unfortunate love for Lesbia, the death of his dearly loved brother, his journey to Bithynia, and his hostility to Caesar and his henchmen. Most of his poetry was inspired by these events and all of them except the last are linked with one another.
Dying about his thirty-third year, he left a small volume which prints up now in less than eighty pages of text (Harris 1). But within the pages of the text are held powerful poems of love, hate, sneers at the rich and noble, as well as poems of the utmost tenderness, delicacy, and madness. Of the 116 extant poems attributed to him, three (18–20) are almost certainly spurious. They include, besides the Lesbia poems, poems to his young friend Juventus; epigrams, ranging from the genial to the obscenely derisive; elegies; a few long poems, notably “Attis” and a nuptial poem honoring Thetis and Peleus; and various short pieces. Two of his most popular poems are the 10-line poem, touching and simple, which ends, “frater ave atque vale” [hail, brother, and farewell], and “On the Death of Lesbia’s Sparrow.
Catullus is a wonderfully humane and witty writer, who conveys tenderness as vividly as lust and hatred. His satire is vigorous and flexible, his light poems joyful and full-bodied. He was influenced by the Alexandrians and drew much on the Greeks for form and meter, but his genius outran all models. Catullus is the pioneer, in Roman literature, not only in the personal and the formal lyric, the epithalamium, and the subjective and the objective elegy but even in the epigram and the lampoon (Harrington 46). There are outstanding examples of all these types in the collection of one hundred and sixteen poems. The first three-score poems are the shorter lyrics in various measures, including however some that are of the epigrammatic nature; the next four are a group of longer pieces, three epithalamia, and the famous Attis, which may be said to belong, in a negative sense, to the same general line of thought; and the remaining poems, all in the elegiac distich, include longer imitations of the Alexandrian elegy, and shorter, subjective expressions of the various intense personal moods of the poet. Besides the poems in the elegiac strophe and the two epithalamia written in the dactylic hexameter, Catullus employs about ten other varieties of measure.
Salty and subversive, Catullus was a Roman poet who delighted in exploring the raunchier side of love and sex. Some of his verses are so exuberantly obscene that, until recently, translations were hard to find. Editors either passed them by or left the really graphic stuff in Latin. In one of his poems, Petrucci promises his lover that he’ll ‘outscore Juventus’ when it comes to kisses – and will ‘not tire or wilt in extra time. In another, he advises a friend that the reason women won’t sleep with him is his body odor – ‘day and night, in each cave of your armpits, is tethered a goat’. Besides erotic outpourings of his passion for a sophisticated older woman, Lesbia, he excelled at heroically abusive attacks on rivals and former friends – threatening them with intimate physical retribution.
The mock-learned is a trademark of Catullus – one that he uses playfully. He positions a word such that the music in the word is amplified by a poetic setting, as the following examples show:
- lasarpiciferis iacet Cyrenis (Catullus 7.4) “[as many kisses as grains of sand] lie on lasarpiciferan Cyrene”
- A rude curse prima imbuit Amphitriten (Catullus 64.11) “That ship first on maiden voyage tinged untilled Amphitrite”.
- In the second example, the mere length of time spent on the name lets one savor the moment when that first keel made a furrow in the sea (Preuter 7).
Ovid
Publius Ovidius Naso (43 B.C. – A.D. 18) was a Latin poet, born in Sulmo (present-day Sulmona), in the Apennines. Though he studied law, his heart was mainly in literature and he enjoyed the company of the literary scholars at Rome. He soon achieved success as a poet and was well known to emperor Augustus. In 8 A.D. he was abruptly exiled to Tomis, a Black Sea outpost, South of the Danube, where he later died (The Columbia University 52958).
The poems of Ovid are studied in three categories – erotic poems, mythological poems, and poems of exile. His verse, with the exception of the Metamorphoses and a fragment (Halieutica), is in the form of elegiacs. The love poems include Amores, 49 short poems, many of which extol the charms of the poet’s mistress Corinna, probably a synthesis of several women; Epistulae heroism (letters from heroines) an imaginary series written by ancient heroines to their absent lovers; Ars amatoria [art of love], didactic, in three books, with complete instructions on how to acquire and keep a lover. In the mythological category, Ovid wrote the Metamorphoses, a masterpiece and perhaps Ovid’s greatest work. Using Greco-Roman mythology as the material of his 15 books and change as his theme, he particularly isolates love as the agent of change, loves now seen in its more profound ethical dimensions (IOF 1). Among readers of the late Middle Ages, the Metamorphoses rivaled the Bible in popularity. Written in hexameters, it is a collection of myths concerned with miraculous transformations linked together with such consummate skill that the whole is artistically harmonious. The Fasti, also a mythological poem, contains six books on the days of the year from January to June, giving the myths, legends, and notable events called to mind on each day. As a source for religious antiquities, it is especially valuable. The poems of exile include Tristia [sorrows], five books of short poems, conveying the poet’s despair in his first five years of exile and his supplications for mercy, and the Epistulae ex Ponto [letters from the Black Sea], in four books was addressed to friends in Rome.
Ovid had a natural talent to write poetry and hence he wrote poetry to give pleasure; He was also a great storyteller and was able to relate complex love stories with verve and deft characterization. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid tells us, Ceres, weary in her search for her lost daughter, stops for a drink of barley water (at a table like this?). When her thirst is mocked by a country boy, she flings the drink at him, “barley grains and all, / And his face was spotted, then, and his arms were legs, / And he grew a tail and shrank, a harmless creature, / Like a lizard, only smaller” (Metamorphoses, translated by Rolfe Humphries). And yet, despite the lizards and the light, there are changes in Ovid’s Rome: a few feet away, Roman traffic goes hurtling past (Boyd 23). The five books collected as Tristia (Sorrows) bring to the readers, Rome of those times. He warns us in exile: “I tell you that Rome’s for a, her arches and temples, are standing on illusions rather than hills. The rude huts around me, their occupants always armed, even to make the short trip to the outhouse–these are the temples to truth and man’s place in the cosmos” (Clarvoe 77). With the exception of the Metamorphoses and the fragmentary Halieutica, both of which are in the dactylic hexameter meter, all the poetry of Ovid is composed in the elegiac couplet, a meter that he brought to its highest degree of perfection (IOF 1). In Ovid, the Latin language seems to be so well adapted to dactylic meter, though resistant to it by nature, that as we read his smooth and easy verses we quite forget that this meter was originally so foreign to the natural character of Latin, and we almost dare to say that the Romans have excelled their Greek models in technique (Boyd 27). “Nihil quod tetigit nontransformation.” – Ovid was from first to last a worker of metamorphoses. The first transfiguration in his poetic oeuvre occurs in the opening lines of the Amores, where he tells how Cupid transformed his hexameters into elegiacs by docking every second verse of afoot. Ovid has remolded the distich as he found it in Gallus, Propertius, and Tibullus into a uniquely flexible and adaptable instrument, giving it what was to prove its definitive form through twenty centuries (Boyd 27).
Ovid has had a great influence on Western literature, ever since literary scholars began rediscovering him during the Renaissance. Many of the mythical characters and stories from the ancient world, such as Pygmalion, King Midas, and Narcissus have originated from Ovid’s presentation in Metamorphoses. Chaucer and Shakespeare took tales and ideas from Ovid’s works. Poets from John Dryden to Ted Hughes have reworked Ovid’s verse. Even today Jeffrey Eugenides acknowledges Ovid as the main inspiration for his acclaimed novel Middlesex (2002) and popular televisions shows retell Ovid’s stories in one form or another.
Virgil
Virgil was born on October 15, 70 B.C.E., in Northern Italy in a small village near Mantua. Virgil was no Roman but a Gaul as his village was situated in what was then called Gallia Cisalpina – Gaul this side of the Alps. Publius Vergilius Maro, or Virgil, is recognized as the greatest Roman poet. His father was a prosperous landowner, who was able to provide a good education for Virgil who attended school at Cremona and Mediolanum (Milan), then went to Rome, where he studied mathematics, medicine, and rhetoric, and finally completed his studies in Naples. He entered literary circles as an “Alexandrian,” the name was given to a group of poets who sought inspiration in the sophisticated work of third-century Greek poets, also known as Alexandrians. In 49 BC Virgil became a Roman citizen. Lucretius influenced his way of thinking, but his early poems were written in the tradition of Theocritus. After the battle of Philippi in 42 B.C.E., Virgil’s property in Cisalpine Gaul, or else his father’s, was confiscated for veterans. During the reign of Emperor Augustus, Virgil became a member of his court circle and was supported by Maecenas a minister and patron of the arts and close friend to the poet Horace. In 31 B.C.E. Octavian won the Battle of Actium and came to power and in 27 BC he was given the title of Augustus (‘venerable’). He pressed Virgil to write of the glory of Rome under his rule. Thus the rest of his life, from 30 to 19 B.C., Virgil devoted to The Aeneid, the national epic of Rome, and the glory of the Empire. On a journey accompanying Augustus from Athens to Megara and then to Italy, Virgil died of a fever contracted in Greece. He had instructed his executor Varius to destroy the manuscript of The Aeneid, but Augustus ordered Varius to ignore this request, and the poem was published. Virgil was buried near Naples and the Tomb of Virgil soon became a place of pilgrimage.
Between 42 and 37 B.C.E. Virgil composed pastoral poems known as Bucolic or Eclogues (‘rustic poems’ and ‘selections’), spent years on the Georgics (literally, ‘pertaining to agriculture), a didactic work on agriculture, and the cultivation of the olive and vine, the rearing of livestock, and beekeeping. The work was based on the model provided by Works and Days, composed by the Greek writer Hesiod in 700 BC. Eclogues was a huge success, and in its famous ‘Messianic Eclogue’ he prophesied the new Golden Age. ” In the poem, according to some interpretations, the shepherd lad who dies is probably Julius Caesar. Of the two contrasting characters, Tityrus and Meliboeus, the former was long considered Virgil in disguise.
Aeneid is a historical epic, depicting one of the great heroes of the Trojan war, recounts Aeneas’ wanderings and adventures from the fall of Troy to the establishment of his destined rule in Latium. The poem was written about 29-19 B.C.E. and composed in hexameters, about 60 lines of which were left unfinished at Virgil’s death. The work is organized in 12 books and starts when Aeneas is forced to land his fleet on the Libyan coast. The Aeneid was in its first half an Odyssey and in its second an Iliad. In Book VI of the Aeneid, the spirit of Anchises shows to his son the future of Rome: “Romans, these are your arts: to bear dominion over the nations, to impose peace, to spare the conquered and subdue the proud.”
Virgil had reshaped the hexameter that he had inherited from Ennius, Catullus, Lucretius, and Cicero (Boyd 27). Dante adopted themes from Virgil’s Aeneid in his epic poem The Divine Comedy. Virgil is also the guide through Dante’s Inferno and Purgatory. A phrase altered from Eclogues – Novus ordo seclorum – appears on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States, first used on the silver dollar certificates, series of 1935. Virgil also supplied the Latin for other phrases of the Great Seal.
Cicero
Marcus Tullius Cicero or Tully (106 B.C. – 43 B.C.) was a great Roman orator who was recognized not only for his oratory skills but also for his roles as a politician and a philosopher. He was born at Arpinum in central Italy on January 3, 106 BC. Cicero was a well-educated man and he studied law and philosophy at Rome, Athens, and Rhodes. He served the government in various posts – as curule aedile (69 B.C.), praetor (66 B.C.), and consul (63 B.C.). He was always a member of the senatorial party, and as party leader he successfully prosecuted Catiline, but he was found guilty of acting illegally and hence exiled in 58 B.C. by his personal enemy, Clodius. He was recalled by Pompey the following year and was hailed as a hero. Strongly opposed to Julius Caesar, Cicero was a leader of the party that caused him to convene the triumvirate at Lucca. During the civil war, he joined Pompey against Caesar. After the civil war, Caesar forgave Cicero and he lived in honor of Rome under the dictatorship. Though he did not take part in the assassination of Caesar, he applauded it. Cicero and Marc Antony were bitter enemies, and Antony attacked Cicero in the senate. When Octavian (later Augustus) took Rome, he allowed Antony to put Cicero’s name among those condemned, and Cicero was put to death on Dec. 7, 43 B.C. (Beck 1).
Cicero’s writings are much valued to date. The major volume of his writings comes in the form of his letters to Atticus, his best friend; to Quintus, his brother; to Brutus, the conspirator; to Caelius, another close friend; and to miscellaneous persons. They are an excellent source of information regarding Roman life and political manners. His philosophical works, which are generally stoical, include De amicitia [on friendship]; De officiis [on duty]; De senectute [on old age], or Cato Major; De Finibus [on ends], a dialogue on the good; The Tusculan Disputations; and De Natura deorum [on the nature of the gods], an attack on various philosophies, especially Epicureanism.
Cicero’s rhetorical works include De orator, addressed to his brother and is a kind of handbook for the young orator; Brutus is an account of Roman oratory, and Orator is a discussion of the ideal orator. The most widely read of Cicero’s works are his orations, which have become the standard of Latin. The most famous of these are the Orations against Catiline, on the occasion of the conspiracy, and the Philippics against Antony. Other famous speeches are those spoken in courts of law such as: Against Verres, On the Manzilian Law, On Behalf of Archias, On Behalf of Balbus, and On Behalf of Roscius. In the Orator, Cicero remarks that there is little difference between poetry and prose. He makes a strong case that sound, impact, and thought are inextricably linked. I have used. Poetic music pressed upon Cicero in everything he wrote. In the Orator (19.66-67), Cicero says that rhythm was once restricted to poetry but now has become so common in prose that a clear and easy distinction between the two no longer exists (May 373).
Some examples of his writings are: Ariadne stands motionless as the sea jests about her. The contrast between the light touch of waves and the irony of gentle slowness of waves strikes a note of sadness and abandonment: fl at ab Epiro longissimus Onchesmites (Letters to Atticus, 7.2) “blew from Epirus most gentle Onchesmites”
This is a fine onomatopoetic line. Flavia makes the sound for a breeze. Epiro lends help to the mood. Lenissimus makes for a lazy sound. Then there is the mock-learned: Onchesmites, a port in northern Epirus used here to tell the wind direction. This word is a double spondee, which makes the image of a breeze, soft and sweet and steady (Preuter 8).
Cicero mentions in the Orator (58.199-200) that a period needs to begin somewhat rhythmically. So his writings have opening words as et multi hoc idem …utebatur hominibus … These are words pleasant to the ear. Cicero uses this taste for pleasure to set us up for the next sentence: Neque ego umquam fuisse tale monstrum in terries Ullum puto, tam ex contrariis diversisque atque inter se pugnacious nature studies cupiditatibusque confl atum (Pro Caelio 12) “And not I that ever was such a monster on the earth and I think, so from contrary and diverse and between themselves fighting desires and lusts of nature blown together”. In this sentence, there is irregular rhythm and word order is jumbled and there is difficulty enunciating the sentence. This reflects the essence of Catiline that is almost beyond expression. Cicero wrestles artistically with words to extract beauty (Prueter 13).
Cicero insists that a good ear is needed to appreciate the nuances of each. Cicero’s literary and oratorical style has earned him both success as a lawyer and fame as an unsurpassed master of Latin prose. Cicero was the single most important author, classical or otherwise, all throughout the humanist movement. He represented several ideals: his language and composition were a model for any use of language particularly Latin (Sadlon 3). He was the first to polish his speeches, to exercise careful word choice, and to compose artistically. Toward the end of his life, his style improved and he used more of those sententiae which characterize modern eloquence (Sadlon 3). His combination of wisdom and eloquence set the standard for all future philosophers and artists of the Renaissance. Apart from wisdom and eloquence, Cicero also took an active part in the public service and governance of the state.
Catullus, Ovid, Virgil, and Cicero are Roman writers of the Golden Age who impacted literature in their own way. Catullus paved the way for erotic thinking and explicit writing. He also excelled in the personal lyric, formal lyric, the epithalamium, and the subjective and the objective elegy, the epigram, and the lampoon. Ovid is best remembered for his erotic, mythological, and exile poems and perfecting the form of elegiacs. Virgil opened new pathways to appreciate pastoral poems and epic poems such as Aeneid. The impact of Cicero on literature was more through his prose and he created new directions in prose making it more poetic – combining wisdom with eloquence. Thus all of these four Golden Age writers have impacted literature through their works – poems and prose.
Works Cited
Beck, Sanderson (2008). Plautus, Terence, and Cicero. Web.
Boyd, Weiden Barbara (2002). Brill’s Companion to Ovid. Brill Publishers. Leiden, Netherlands. 2002.
Clarvoe, Jennifer (2004). Vivamus, Vivamus: Living with Ovid’s Amores. The Antioch Review. Volume: 62. Issue: 1.
Harrington, Pomeroy Karl (1923). Catullus and his influence. Marshall Jones Publishers. Boston.
Harris, William (2008). Gaius Valerius Catullus. Web.
IOF (Island of Freedom) (2008). Ovid 43 B.C. – 17 A. D. Web.
May, M. James (2002). Brill’s Companion to Cicero: Oratory and Rhetoric. Brill Publishers. Leiden, Netherlands.
Prueter, William (2006). Sound, Impact and Thought in Catullus and Cicero. Humanitas. Vol. 20. Issue 2. Pages 7-15.
Sadlon, Peter (2008). Humanism. Web.
The Columbia Encyclopedia (2007). Ovid. Sixth Edition. 52958.