By Thomas F. X. Noble, PhD, University of Notre Dame
The reign of Augustus has often been called the Golden Age of Rome. This was the age of many great cultural achievements—including the writing of Roman poetry by the master poets Virgil and Ovid.
Virgil and the Aeneid
The greatest poet of the Golden Age of Rome, Publius Virgilius Maro—Virgil—was born in 70 B.C. and died in 19 B.C. Virgil is one of the true immortals, a poet who was read in antiquity and has been read ever since. He is best known for his great epic the Aeneid, the story of Aeneas, the founder of Rome. Aeneas, in some ways, the dullest character in epic literature, elicited the values that the Romans wished to hold up to themselves, what the Romans wanted to see when they looked in the mirror.
Learn More: The Rise of Rome
The Aeneid is one of the great masterpieces of world literature. Its theme is the somber dignity of Rome’s past. In almost dirge-like quality, Virgil composed his poem, thousands of lines, in dactylic hexameter. A hexameter is a six-foot line; a dactyl is a poetic foot that consists of one long and two short beats: boom, boom-boom. The fifth foot of a dactylic hexameter line is always the dactyl. We’re unfamiliar with dactylic hexameter in English because English almost cannot be written in dactylic hexameter. The rhythms of our language just don’t lend themselves to it.
Virgil wrote the poem from the first word to the last. When he died, about two-dozen lines of the poem were still incomplete, and in his will, Virgil wanted the entire poem destroyed. The emperor Augustus violated his will, and he saved the Aeneid.
This is a transcript from the video series The Foundations of Western Civilization. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
The 33rd line of the first book of the Aeneid is where Virgil tells us what his great poem is going to be about: “Tantae molis erat Romanum condere gentem.” There’s something very dignified about it, very graceful and elegant. But what does it mean?
It translates to, “Oh, what a job it was to found the Roman people.” Virgil was not the kind of person to run around pridefully chanting, “We’re number one, we’re great!” Tantae molis erat, or such a great burden it was to found the Roman people. It was a difficult task that he asserts Rome clung to, but it was accomplished and is Virgil’s great theme.
Learn more about the culture of the Roman Republic
When we first meet him, Aeneas is carrying his aged father Anchises on his back out of burning Troy. Roman families believed in deference to the pater familias and the importance of ancestors. Aeneas isn’t fleeing Troy, but carrying his aged father on his back out of the city. This is the first time that Virgil signals we should pay attention: To be a Roman, look to Aeneas.
Aeneas has set forth on a mission from which he will not be deterred. Along the way, the reader encounters examples of family devotion, honesty, integrity, determination, courage, and humanity. In other words, all the “typical” Roman values.
Aeneas was harried by Juno, the goddess who had favored the Trojans. Everything was not to be smooth and easy. The Romans had their good qualities and their problems—Rome was going to struggle; thus, Rome’s founding was no small task.
At one point Venus, Aeneas’s patroness, went to her father, Jupiter, to ask if he was going to remain true to his promises. He’d made her great promises for Aeneas. Virgil put these words into the mouth of the chief of the gods, and in doing so, tells us something about the early years of Augustus’s reign, how the Romans saw themselves, and their sense of destiny.
Venus has gone to her father and said that Juno is stirring things up and making awful problems on earth. “Aren’t you going to fulfill your promises?” Jupiter replies:
… fate remains unmoved
For the Roman generations. You will witness
Lavinium’s rise, her walls fulfill the promise;
You will bring to heaven lofty-souled Aeneas.
There has been no change in me whatever. Listen!
To ease this care, I will prophesy a little,
I will open the book of fate. Your son Aeneas
Will wage a mighty war in Italy,
Beat down proud nations, give his people laws,
Found for them a city …
To these I set no bounds in space or time;
They shall rule forever. Even bitter Juno
Whose fear now harries earth and sea and heaven
Will change to better counsels and will cherish
The race that wears the toga, Roman masters
Of all the world. It is decreed.
Thus, Virgil on the Romans. And thus, the Roman sense that the world would last exactly as long as Rome. It is decreed.
While he is mainly remembered for the Aeneid, it’s worth mentioning that Virgil wrote two other technically accomplished poems, the Georgics and the Eclogues, which were much admired in later times as models of Latin poetic meter. These poems were in praise of the countryside and of traditional rural life.
Learn More: Rome—From Republic to Empire
Ovid Lightens the Tone
Not everything in Augustus’s time was quite so serious and somber. The poet Ovid, 43 B.C. to A.D. 18, was learned, accomplished, and prolific. Ovid wrote love elegies notably, the Amores—the Loves. He also wrote a didactic spoof, Ars Amatoria, The Art of Love, which is a sort of a seduction manual. Most famously, he wrote an epic scale encyclopedia of mythological tales, The Metamorphoses, or, The Great Changes. There is a lot of tongue-in-cheek humor in Ovid, but there’s also a very powerful sense of deep feeling. He betrays something else, too. He’s immensely learned, but it is perhaps his feelings that are clearest.
Ovid could be technically accomplished, but he got a little bit too playful, for which the ever-stern Augustus exiled him from Rome. His poetry has survived however as a delight and entertainment of the Western tradition ever since.
Horace: Third Poet of the Golden Age
A bit different is the elegant Horace, 65–8 B.C., a sage, urbane Epicurean. He was prized in his own time and prized ever since. Perhaps the most technically accomplished of all the Roman poets, he was patronized by a man named Maecenas, whose name became a synonym for patronage throughout the Western tradition. Horace was one of those who flourished under Augustus, whose regime provided an opportunity for him to do all that he was able to do. He wrote odes, satires, letters, even a treatise on poetry. He was a man of considerable learning, breadth, and ability.
Here is a 17th-century translation of one of Horace’s odes:
Strive not, Leuconoë, to know what end
The gods above to me or thee will send;
Nor with Astrologers consult at all,
That thou mayest know what better can befall:
Whether thou liv’st more winters, or thy last
Be this, which Tyrrhene waves ’gainst rocks do cast.
Be wise! Drink free, and in so short a space
Do not protracted hopes of life embrace:
Whilst we are talking, envious Time doth slide;
This day’s thine own; the next may be denied.
You can note the Epicurean tone: Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you die. Of the future, who can say?
Virgil, Ovid, and Horace: They were the poets of the Golden Age, a period that marked Western civilization as, before it, only Periclean Athens had done.
Common Questions About Roman Poetry
Roman writing was quite diverse in subject matter. Some stories and poems centered on the lives of ordinary citizens and farmers, while others wrote of epic heroes and battles.
Ancient Roman literature primarily spanned the genres of philosophy, comedy, drama, and history.
Latin was the language that Romans spoke. Because so many languages have Latin roots, many European writers such as Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton wrote in Latin even after the decline of the Roman Empire.
Roman literature was highly influential when it came to the skill of persuasion, stoic philosophy, and the poetry of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid.
