"This authoritative history of Latin literature offers a comprehensive survey of the thousand-year period from the origins of Latin as a written language to the early Middle Ages. At once a reference work, a bibliographic guide, a literary study, and a reader's handbook, Latin Literature: A History is the first work of its kind to appear in English in nearly four decades." "From the first examples of written Latin through Gregory of Tours in the sixth century and the Venerable Bede in the seventh, Latin Literature offers a wide-ranging panorama of all major Latin authors. Including names, dates, edition citations, and detailed summaries, the work combines the virtues of an encyclopedia with the critical intelligence readers have come to expect from Italy's leading Latinist, Gian Biagio Conte. Many of the entries - those on Virgil and Petronius, for example - provide elegantly compact formulations of work on the very frontier of current study, and virtually all entries offer something of interest for the lay reader and expert alike."--BOOK JACKET.

Translation of: Letteratura latina.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Foreword / Elaine Fantham Introduction: Literary History and Historiography Pt. 1. The Early and Middle Republics The Origins The Early Roman Theater Livius Andronicus Naevius Plautus Caecilius Statius Oratory and Historiography in the Archaic Period Literature and Culture in the Period of the Conquests Ennius Cato Terence The Development of Tragedy: Pacuvius and Accius The Development of Epic Poetry: From Ennius to Virgil Lucilius Politics and Culture between the Era of the Gracchi and the Sullan Restoration Pt. 2. The Late Republic The Age of Caesar (78-44 B.C.) Neoteric Poetry and Catullus Lucretius Cicero Philology, Biography, and Antiquarianism at the End of the Republic Caesar Sallust Pt. 3. The Age of Augustus 43 BC.-A.D. 17: Characteristics of a Period Virgil Horace Elegy: Tibullus and Propertius Ovid

Livy Directions in Historiography Scholarship and Technical Disciplines Legal Literature: From Its Beginnings to the Early Empire Pt. 4. The Early Empire Culture and Spectacle: The Literature of the Early Empire Seneca The Poetic Genres in the Julio-Claudian Period Lucan Petronius Satire under the Principate: Persius and Juvenal Epic in the Flavian Period Pliny the Elder and Specialist Knowledge Martial and the Epigram Quintilian The Age of the Adoptive Emperors Pliny the Younger Tacitus Suetonius and the Minor Historians Apuleius Philology, Rhetoric and Literary Criticism, Law Developments in Poetry: The Poetae Novelli Pt. 5. The Late Empire From the Severans to Diocletian (193-305) From Constantine to the Sack of Rome (306-410) The Apogee of Christian Culture From Honorius to Odoacer (410-476) The Dawn of the Middle Ages. App.1. Chronological Tables App.2. Greek Authors and Texts App.3. Roman Culture: Politics, Society, Ideology App.4. Terms of Rhetoric, Metrics, and Literary Criticism.