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Explore the timline of Roman Literature. The Roman Empire and its predecessor the Roman Republic produced an abundance of celebrated literature; poetry, comedies, dramas, histories, and philosophical tracts; the Romans avoided tragedies.
- Donald L. Wasson
Jun 15, 2023 · published on 15 June 2023. From its infancy, Roman literature borrowed heavily from the Greeks. However, they were able to shake the shackles and create a vibrant literature of their own; poetry, prose, and history. The Roman authors influenced countless others in the decades and centuries that followed – Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and many more.
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History >> Ancient Rome. Kids learn about the literature and writing of Ancient Rome including language, poetry and poets, speeches and rhetoric, historians, philosophy, writing materials, and fun facts.
- Greek Influence
- Comic Playwrights
- Golden Age of Roman Poetry
- Silver Age of Roman Poetry
- Roman Prose
- Later Roman Literature
- Historians
- Legacy
This indebtedness to Greece was even recognized by the writers themselves. Horace, one of the poets of the Golden Age of Roman literature wrote that Greece introduced the arts "into a backward Latium." Historian Nigel Rodgers in his Roman Empire wrote that Greek authors originated many philosophical and political concepts that influenced such Roman...
According to Rodgers, there was little in the way of Roman literature before the Punic Wars against Carthage (264 – 146 BCE). It was during this time that Rome became involved in the Macedonian Wars, eventually absorbing the Greek city-states. Roman literature began near the end of the 3rd century BCE with the emergence of such comic playwrights as...
As foretold by Ennius, Latin literature would soon truly come into its own. The Golden Age of Roman poetry (c. 70 BCE – 14 CE) produced such memorable writers as Virgil, Horace, Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid. According to Rodgers, Virgil, Horace, and the exiled Ovid created a classical style of writingcomparable to many of the great Gree...
Two famous Roman poets linked to what has been called the Silver Age of Roman poetry are Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, better known as Lucan (39 – 65 CE), and Publius Papinius Statius (45 – 96 CE). Lucan, born in Spain, was the nephew of Seneca, the advisor of Emperor Nero. He even studied Stoic philosophy in Athens; however, his suspected involvement in...
While there was an abundance of poets in Rome, there were also many outstanding writers of prose. The city was alive with orators who took to the stage in the Roman Forum to voice their views to the masses. It was a platform as well for lawyers who wished to plead for their clients. One of the more memorable was Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 – 43 BCE)...
The spread of Christianity gave rise to a new type of literature from the 4th century CE, with clerics writing on Christian morality in sharp contrast to the amoral and often sexually explicit works of the previous centuries. One of the premier clerics of the 4th century was St. Ambrose (c. 340 – 397 CE). Ambrosius was the son of the praetorian pre...
Besides the writers of poetry and prose, there were the historians: Sallust, Tacitus, Livy, and Suetonius. Unfortunately, much of early Roman history is based on myth, and some historians sadly accepted it as fact. However, real or not, it gave the Romans a sense of identity. The first historian of note was Gaius Sallustius Crispus or Sallust (c. 8...
From its infancy, Roman literature borrowed heavily from the Greeks. However, they were able to shake the shackles and create a vibrant literature of their own; poetry, prose, and history. The Roman authors influenced countless others in the decades and centuries that followed – Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and many more. One cannot enter either a l...
- Donald L. Wasson
Ancient Roman literature began sometime around 240 B.C. when a Roman audience witnessed a Latin version of a Greek play that involved adaptor Livius Andronicus who was brought to Rome as a prisoner of war during 272 B.C.
The Romans engaged in literature as well, and they are great contributors to what we consider classic literature. Virgil’s great epic, the Aeneid, tells the story of the hero Aeneas fleeing Troy and founding Rome via his descendants.
Explore the history of Ancient Rome with your KS2 students using this range of timeline resources and activities about the Roman Empire.
