Anna Chigas’s Reviews > Latin Literature: A History > Status Update

Horace’s carpe diem should not be misunderstood as a banal invitation to pleasure; like Epicurus, the invitation to pleasure is not separate from the keen awareness that the pleasure itself is fleeing, as human life is fleeing. The only possibility is to erect, against the imminence of death or misfortune, the solid protection of possessions already enjoyed, happiness already experienced.

These poems produce an impression of immediacy, of a life reflected in them, that in the history of criticism has led to a persistence misunderstanding, that the poetry is artless and spontaneous and that the poet is a "child" who preely gives vent to his feelings, without the bonds of morality and the filters of culture.

Latin historical writing was in general developed by members of the ruling class, not by those of high political rank, who looked upon historical research as stylistic elaboration as so much time subtracted from real political action. Nonetheless, in the age of Sulla one witnesses the phenomenon of important politicians writing commentarii on themselves.

The origins of Roman satire were mysterious even for the learned. The connection with Greek satyros is utterly false, even though it's ancient. It is certain that satura lanx indicated in early Rome a mixed dish of first offerings that was presented to the gods; and a form of judicial procedure called lex per saturam, when laws on different subjects were joined in a single legislative enactment.

In a culture of contrast and ideological ferment, rich intellectual content alligned with an increasing taste for pathos in the Roman tragic genre: ghosts, dreams, prodigies, madness, deception, betrayals and cruelty; an appetite for the picturesque and the horrible. In this sense Pacuvius and Accius are the principal avant-garde exponents of a line of anti-classicism running through Roman literature.