precise.â
Like most cultured young Romans, Julius tried his hand at drama; however, his successor, Augustus, decreed that such juvenilia as the
Oedipus,
as well as
Collected Sayings
and
In Praise of Hercules,
should not be circulated. The
Conquest of Gaul
was completed by his friend Hirtius, and other volumes of âmemoirsâ detailing the campaigns in Alexandria, Africa, and Spain were soon appearing from opportunistic authors. Caesar was also a poet: his lost verse travelogue
The Journey
detailed his travels over twenty-four days between Rome and Spain, and an
Essay on Analogy
was said to have been composed while he was crossing the Alps.
Under Augustus, Roman literature flourished: Virgil dedicated his
Aeneid
to the emperor, Horace praised him in exquisitely ironic, nuanced
Odes,
and Ovid entertained with risqué humor, until he overstepped the mark. Surrounded by such talents, it is unsurprising that the emperor scrapped his tragedy
Ajax,
and contented himself with a brief poem on Sicily (though it too was lost) and his thirteen-volume
My Autobiography.
This early example of a politicianâs self-assessment was not considered sufficiently pertinent to preserve, though his grandiloquently entitled
Actions of the Divine Augustus,
carved rather than entrusted to friable scrolls, allows us a little insight into his sense of his own achievements. No doubt
An Encouragement to the Study of Philosophy
was a very worthy endeavor; however, it has not been handed down to posterity.
Tiberius Caesar completed Augustusâ
Reply to Brutusâ Eulogy of Cato,
and wrote his own
Elegy on the Death of Julius Caesar.
According to Suetonius, his prose style was affected and ponderous, and his taste in literature rather limited. He preferred the works of Euphorion, Rhianus, and Parthenius, none of which have survived, even though academics attempted to outdo each other in producing editions of the emperorâs favorite writing. As he declined into bloated, lecherous decrepitude, he spent more time patronizing toadies than bothering to do anything himself. Asellius Sabinus appreciated the two thousand gold coins he received for a dialogue where a mushroom, an oyster, a fig, and a thrush argue who is tastiest.
Gaius Caesar, nicknamed Caligula, was âno man of letters,â according to his biographer. He thought Virgil overrated, and dismissed Seneca: but then again, he found the idea that gods might be superior to him infuriating. In one notorious act of literary criticism, he not only burned the work of an Atellan comedian, but then had the author burned in the theater. The only flashes of eloquence conspicuous in Caligula are in his sadistic wit. âIf only the Roman people had a single neck!â he screamed, when the crowd cheered for the wrong team. His uncle, the stammering Claudius, destroyed two manuscripts of Caligulaâs that he found in the private apartments on his accession: one entitled
The Dagger
and another called
The Sword,
detailing his insane nephewâs program of conspiracies and intended victims.
Claudius, like Augustus, wrote an autobiography, which, according to Suetonius, suffered from âlack of tasteâ rather than âlack of style.â The work he was most proud of was a typically eccentric scheme. Claudius decided to reform the Latin alphabet, introducing three new characters: ) to represent the Greek
psi,
⦠for a vowel between
u
and
i,
and for the consonantal
v.
Both the
Official Gazette
and state monuments adopted the new letters, and dropped them soon after the emperorâs demise.
In Greek, rather than Latin, Claudius compiled twenty volumes of Etruscan history and eight volumes of Carthaginian history. His Roman history stretched to forty-three volumes, heavily censored by his family. So voluminous was his output that the Library at Alexandria had to build a new wing, the Claudian, to commemorate his historical writing. Even this testament to a state
Like most cultured young Romans, Julius tried his hand at drama; however, his successor, Augustus, decreed that such juvenilia as the
Oedipus,
as well as
Collected Sayings
and
In Praise of Hercules,
should not be circulated. The
Conquest of Gaul
was completed by his friend Hirtius, and other volumes of âmemoirsâ detailing the campaigns in Alexandria, Africa, and Spain were soon appearing from opportunistic authors. Caesar was also a poet: his lost verse travelogue
The Journey
detailed his travels over twenty-four days between Rome and Spain, and an
Essay on Analogy
was said to have been composed while he was crossing the Alps.
Under Augustus, Roman literature flourished: Virgil dedicated his
Aeneid
to the emperor, Horace praised him in exquisitely ironic, nuanced
Odes,
and Ovid entertained with risqué humor, until he overstepped the mark. Surrounded by such talents, it is unsurprising that the emperor scrapped his tragedy
Ajax,
and contented himself with a brief poem on Sicily (though it too was lost) and his thirteen-volume
My Autobiography.
This early example of a politicianâs self-assessment was not considered sufficiently pertinent to preserve, though his grandiloquently entitled
Actions of the Divine Augustus,
carved rather than entrusted to friable scrolls, allows us a little insight into his sense of his own achievements. No doubt
An Encouragement to the Study of Philosophy
was a very worthy endeavor; however, it has not been handed down to posterity.
Tiberius Caesar completed Augustusâ
Reply to Brutusâ Eulogy of Cato,
and wrote his own
Elegy on the Death of Julius Caesar.
According to Suetonius, his prose style was affected and ponderous, and his taste in literature rather limited. He preferred the works of Euphorion, Rhianus, and Parthenius, none of which have survived, even though academics attempted to outdo each other in producing editions of the emperorâs favorite writing. As he declined into bloated, lecherous decrepitude, he spent more time patronizing toadies than bothering to do anything himself. Asellius Sabinus appreciated the two thousand gold coins he received for a dialogue where a mushroom, an oyster, a fig, and a thrush argue who is tastiest.
Gaius Caesar, nicknamed Caligula, was âno man of letters,â according to his biographer. He thought Virgil overrated, and dismissed Seneca: but then again, he found the idea that gods might be superior to him infuriating. In one notorious act of literary criticism, he not only burned the work of an Atellan comedian, but then had the author burned in the theater. The only flashes of eloquence conspicuous in Caligula are in his sadistic wit. âIf only the Roman people had a single neck!â he screamed, when the crowd cheered for the wrong team. His uncle, the stammering Claudius, destroyed two manuscripts of Caligulaâs that he found in the private apartments on his accession: one entitled
The Dagger
and another called
The Sword,
detailing his insane nephewâs program of conspiracies and intended victims.
Claudius, like Augustus, wrote an autobiography, which, according to Suetonius, suffered from âlack of tasteâ rather than âlack of style.â The work he was most proud of was a typically eccentric scheme. Claudius decided to reform the Latin alphabet, introducing three new characters: ) to represent the Greek
psi,
⦠for a vowel between
u
and
i,
and for the consonantal
v.
Both the
Official Gazette
and state monuments adopted the new letters, and dropped them soon after the emperorâs demise.
In Greek, rather than Latin, Claudius compiled twenty volumes of Etruscan history and eight volumes of Carthaginian history. His Roman history stretched to forty-three volumes, heavily censored by his family. So voluminous was his output that the Library at Alexandria had to build a new wing, the Claudian, to commemorate his historical writing. Even this testament to a state
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