Latin literature, the body of
written works in the
Latin language, remains an enduring legacy of the
culture of
ancient Rome. The Romans produced many works of poetry, comedy, tragedy, satire, history, and rhetoric, drawing heavily on the traditions of other cultures and particularly on the more matured
literary tradition of Greece. Long after the Western Roman Empire had fallen, the Latin language continued to play a central role in western European civilization.
Latin literature is conventionally divided into distinct periods. Few works remain of Early and
Old Latin; among these few surviving works, however, are the plays of
Plautus and
Terence, which have remained very popular in all eras down to the present, while many other Latin works, including many by the most prominent authors of the Classical period, have disappeared, sometimes being re-discovered after centuries, sometimes not. The period of
Classical Latin, when Latin literature is widely considered to have reached its peak, is divided into the
Golden Age, which covers approximately the period from the start of the
1st century BC up to the mid-
1st century AD, and the
Silver Age, which extends into the 2nd century AD. Literature written after the mid-2nd century has often been disparaged and ignored; in the
Renaissance, for example, when many Classical authors were re-discovered and their style consciously imitated. Above all,
Cicero was imitated, and his style praised as the perfect pinnacle of Latin. Medieval Latin was often dismissed as "Dog-Latin"; however, in fact, many great works of Latin literature were produced throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, although they are no longer as widely known as the ancient Romans.
For most of the Medieval era, Latin was the dominant written language in use in western Europe. After the Roman Empire split into its Western and Eastern halves, Greek, which had been widely used all over the Empire, faded from use in the West, all the more so as the political and religious distance steadily grew between the Catholic West and the Orthodox, Greek East. The vernacular languages in the West, the languages of modern-day western Europe, developed for centuries as spoken languages only: most people did not write, and it seems that it very seldom occurred to those who wrote to write in any language other than Latin, even when they spoke French or Italian or English or another vernacular in their daily life. Very gradually, in the late
Middle Ages and the early
Renaissance, it became more and more common to write in the Western vernaculars.
It was probably only after the invention of printing, which made books and pamphlets cheap enough that a mass public could afford them, and which made possible modern phenomena such as the newspaper, that a large number of people in the West could read and write who were not fluent in Latin. Still, many people continued to write in Latin, although they were mostly from the upper classes and/or professional academics. As late as the 17th century, there was still a large audience for Latin poetry and drama; no-one found it strange, for example, that, besides his works in English,
Milton wrote many poems in Latin, or that
Francis Bacon or
Baruch Spinoza wrote mostly in Latin. The use of Latin as a lingua franca continued in smaller European lands until the 19th century.
Although the number of works of fiction and poetry, history and philosophy written in Latin has continued to dwindle, the Latin language is still not dead. Well into the nineteenth century, some knowledge of Latin was required for admission into many universities, and theses and dissertations written for graduate degrees were often required to be written in Latin. Treatises in chemistry and biology and other natural sciences were often written in Latin as late as the early 20th century. Up to the present day, the editors of Latin and Greek texts in such series as the
Oxford Classical Texts, the
Bibliotheca scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana and some others still write the introductions to their editions in polished and vital Latin. Among these Latin scholars of the 20th and 21st centuries are R A B Mynors, R J Tarrant, L D Reynolds and John Brisco.
Early Latin literature
Poetry
- Ennius
Tragedy
- Lucius Accius
- Pacuvius
Comedy
- Plautus
- Caecilius Statius
- Terence
Classical Latin
Golden Age
Poetry
- Lucretius : On the Nature of Things
- Catullus
- Virgil : Aeneid
- Horace
- Ovid : Metamorphoses
- Tibullus
- Propertius
Prose
- Julius Caesar : Gallic Wars
- Cicero : Catiline Orations
History
- Nepos
- Sallust
- Livy
Silver Latin
Poetry
- Manilius
- Lucan
- Martial
- Statius
Prose
- Petronius : Satyricon
- Pliny the Elder : Natural History
- Quintilian
- Pliny the Younger
- Aulus Gellius
- Apuleius
- Asconius
Theater
- Seneca
Satire
- Persius
- Juvenal: Satires
History
- Tacitus
- Suetonius, especially Lives of the Twelve Caesars
Latin Literature in the Late Antique period
Christians
- Saint Augustine of Hippo
- Boethius and Consolation of Philosophy
- Paulinus of Nola
- Prudentius
- Sidonius Apollinaris
- Sulpicius Severus
non-Christians
- Ammianus Marcellinus
- Ausonius
- Distichs of Cato
- Claudian
- Eutropius
- Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius
- Scriptores Historiae Augustae (anonymous)
- Quintus Aurelius Symmachus
Medieval Latin literature
Theology and Philosophy
- Pierre Abélard
- Aetheria
- Albertus Magnus
- Thomas Aquinas : Pange Lingua : Summa Theologica
- Roger Bacon
- Duns Scotus
- Gildas
- Gregory of Tours
- Saint Jerome : Vulgate
- Siger of Brabant
- Tommaso da Celano : Dies Iræ
- Venantius Fortunatus
- Walter of Châtillon
Poetry
- The Archpoet
- Carmina Burana
- Goliards
- Peter of Blois
- Hildegard of Bingen
History
- Albert of Aix
- Bede
- Einhard
- Fulcher of Chartres
- Matthew Paris
- Orderic Vitalis
- Otto of Freising
- William of Malmesbury
- William of Tyre
Pseudo-History
- Geoffrey of Monmouth
Encyclopedia
- Isidore of Seville : Etymologiæ
many different genres
- Alcuin
Renaissance Latin
- Dante Alighieri
- Giovanni Boccaccio
- Erasmus
- Jean Buridan
- Thomas More : Utopia
- Petrarch
- William of Ockham
Neo-Latin
(Most of these authors wrote in their various vernaculars as well as in Latin, but each produced a body of Latin work significant in quantity and quality.)
- Francis Bacon
- Jacob Bidermann
- Thomas Hobbes
- John Milton
- Baruch Spinoza
Recent Latin
See also
External links
Spanish Golden Age Laws on Female Actors In Spain theatre thrived during its Golden Age, a period from about 1550 to 1700. Three types of drama were popular: the religious one acts called autos sacramentales, the secular full- length comedias nuevas, and also the musical zarzuelas
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16th century in literature – 1590s
15th century in literature 14th century in literature – Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer 13th century in literature – Parzival – Wolfram von Eschenbach
..... Click the link for more information. science fiction is diverse and since there is little consensus of definition among scholars or devotees, its origin is an open question. Some offer works like the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh as the primal texts of science fiction.
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The history of ideas is a field of research in history that deals with the expression, preservation, and change of human ideas over time. The history of ideas is a sister-discipline to, or a particular approach within, intellectual history.
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Intellectual history refers to the history of the people who create, discuss, write about and in other ways propagate ideas. Although the field emerged from European discourses of Kulturgeschichte and Geistesgeschichte, the historical study of ideas has engaged not only
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For other meanings of epic, see .
The
epic is long, exalted narrative poetry, generally concerning a serious subject and details the heroic deeds and events important to a culture or nation.
..... Click the link for more information. romance or chivalric romance refers to a style of heroic prose and verse narrative current in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.
Characteristics of the romance
..... Click the link for more information. novel (from, Italian novella, Spanish novela, French nouvelle for "new", "news", or "short story of something new") is today a long prose narrative set out in writing.
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Prose is writing distinguished from poetry by its greater variety of rhythm and its closer resemblance to the patterns of everyday speech. The word prose comes from the Latin prosa, meaning straightforward, hence the term "prosaic," which is often seen as pejorative.
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Poetry (from the Greek "ποίησις", poiesis, a "making" or "creating") is a form of art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its ostensible
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For the first part of this article, see .
Modern Literature, 19th century
The 19th century was perhaps the most literary of all centuries, because not only were the forms of novel, short story and magazine serial all in existence side-by-side with
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list of lists of books in Wikipedia:
General lists
- List of books by title (This list was moved to Wikiproject Books.
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By name
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
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Lists of people
By belief
By nationality
By occupation
By office held
By prize won
Science and technology
..... Click the link for more information. Literature is prose, written or oral, including fiction and non-fiction, drama and poetry. See also the list of basic poetry topics. Basic topics in literature include:
Nature of literature
Main article: Literature
..... Click the link for more information. The following is a list of
literary terms; that is, those words used in discussion, classification, criticism, and analysis of literature.
- See also: Glossary of poetry terms, Literary criticism, Literary theory
..... Click the link for more information. Literary criticism is the study, discussion, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals.
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Literary theory is the theory (or the philosophy) of the interpretation of literature and literary criticism. Its history begins with classical Greek poetics and rhetoric and includes, since the 18th century, aesthetics and hermeneutics.
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The History of literature begins with the history of writing, in Bronze Age Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, although the oldest literary texts that have come down to us date to a full millennium after the invention of writing, to the late 3rd millennium BC.
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Arabic literature (Arabic ,الأدب العربي ) Al-Adab Al-Arabi, is the writing produced, both prose and poetry, by speakers (not necessarily native speakers) of the Arabic language.
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Chinese literature spans back thousands of years, from the earliest recorded dynastic court archives to the matured fictional novel arising in the medieval period to entertain the masses of literate Chinese.
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Greek literature refers to those writings autochthonic to the areas of Greeks|Greek]influence, typically though not necessarily in one of the Greek dialects, throughout the whole period in which the Greeks|Greek-speaking peoples have existed.
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Indian literature is generally acknowledged as one of the oldest in the world. India has 22 officially recognized languages, and a huge variety of literature has been produced in these languages over the years. In Indian literature, oral and written forms are both important.
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Assamese literature is the entire corpus of poetry, novels, short stories, documents etc written in the Assamese language. It also includes such writings and popular ballads in the older forms of the language during its evolution to the contemporary form.
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The first evidence of Bengali literature is known as Charyapada or Charyageeti, which were Buddhist hymns from the 8th century. Charyapada is in the oldest known written form of Bengali.
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Hindi literature Hindi poetry is divided into four prominent forms or styles, being Bhakti (devotional - Kabir, Raskhan); Shringar (beauty - Keshav, Bihari); Veer-Gatha (extolling brave warriors); and Adhunik (modern).
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Kannada literature refers to the literature in Kannada language spoken mainly in the Indian state of Karnataka. Kannada literature has been the most successful among all contemporary Indian literatures, having been awarded seven Jnanpith awards.
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Kashmiri literature (Kashmiri: कॉशुर साहित्य) has a history of at least 2,500 years, going back to its glory days of Sanskrit.
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Literature written in Malayalam language.
Art
- Nātyakalpadrumam Theatrical Study by Padma Shri Guru Māni Mādhava Chākyār
Poetry
- Manipravalam
- Champoos
- Sandesakavyam
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