=The Age of Augustus.=—­There is common agreement in regarding the fifty years of the government of Augustus as the most brilliant period in Latin literature.  It is the time of Vergil, Horace, Ovid, Tibullus, Propertius, and Livy.  The emperor, or rather his friend Maecenas, personally patronized some of these poets, especially Horace and Vergil, who sang the glory of Augustus and of his time.  But this Augustan Age was preceded and followed by two centuries that perhaps equalled it.  It was in the preceding century,[157] the first before Christ, that the most original Roman poet[158] appeared, Caesar the most elegant prose-writer, and Cicero the greatest orator.  It was in the following age that Seneca, Lucan, Tacitus, Pliny, and Juvenal wrote.  Between Lucretius and Tacitus there were for three centuries many great writers in Rome.  One might also add another century by recurring to the time of Plautus, the second century before Christ.

Of these great authors a few had their origin in Roman families; but the majority of them were Italians.  Many came from the provinces, Vergil from Mantua, Livy from Padua (in Cisalpine Gaul), while Seneca was a Spaniard.

=Orators and Rhetors.=—­The true national art at Rome was eloquence.  Like the Italians of our day, the Romans loved to speak in public.  In the forum where they held the assemblies of the people was the rostrum, the platform for addressing the people, so named from the prows of captured ships that ornamented it like trophies of war.  Thither the orators came in the last epoch of the republic to declaim and to gesticulate before a tumultuous crowd.

The tribunals, often composed of a hundred judges, furnished another occasion for eloquent advocates.  The Roman law permitted the accused to have an advocate speak in his place.

There were orators in Rome from the second century.  Here, as in Athens, the older orators, such as Cato and the Gracchi, spoke simply, too simply for the taste of Cicero.  Those who followed them in the first century learned in the schools of the Greek rhetors the long oratorical periods and pompous style.  The greatest of all was Cicero, the only one whose works have come down to us in anything but fragments; and yet we have his speeches as they were left by him and not as they were delivered.[159]

With the fall of the republic the assemblies and the great political trials ceased.  Eloquence perished for the want of matter, and the Roman writers remarked this with bitterness.[160] Then the rhetors commenced to multiply, who taught the art of speaking well.[161] Some of these teachers had their pupils compose as exercises pleas on imaginary rhetorical subjects.  The rhetor Seneca has left us many of these oratorical themes; they discuss stolen children, brigands, and romantic adventures.

Then came the mania for public lectures.  Pollio, a favorite of Augustus, had set the example.  For a century it was the fashion to read poems, panegyrics, even tragedies before an audience of friends assembled to applaud them.  The taste for eloquence that had once produced great orators exhibited in the later centuries only finished declaimers.