The history of Latin poetry can be understood as the adaptation of
Greek models. The verse comedies of
Plautus, the earliest surviving examples of
Latin literature, are estimated to have been composed around 205-184 BC.
History
Scholars conventionally date the start of Latin literature to the first performance of a play in verse by a Greek slave,
Livius Andronicus
Lucius Livius Andronicus (; el, Λούκιος Λίβιος Ανδρόνικος; c. 284 – c. 204 BC) was a Greco-Roman dramatist and epic poet of the Old Latin period during the Roman Republic. He began as an educator in the service of a n ...
, at Rome in 240 BC. Livius translated Greek
New Comedy for Roman audiences, using
meters that were basically those of
Greek drama, modified to the needs of Latin. His successors
Plautus ( 254 – 184 BC) and
Terence ( 195/185 – 159? BC) further refined the borrowings from the Greek stage and the
prosody of their verse is substantially the same as for classical Latin verse.
Ennius (239 – 169 BC), virtually a contemporary of Livius, introduced the traditional meter of Greek epic, the
dactylic hexameter, into Latin literature; he substituted it for the jerky
Saturnian meter in which Livius had been composing epic verses. Ennius moulded a poetic diction and style suited to the imported hexameter, providing a model for "classical" poets such as
Virgil and
Ovid.
The late republic saw the emergence of
Neoteric Poets
The Neoterikoi (Ancient Greek: '; Latin: ', "new poets") or Neoterics were a series of avant-garde Latin poets who wrote in the 1st century BCE. Neoteric poets deliberately turned away from classical Homeric epic poetry. Rather than focusing on the ...
, notably
Catullusrich young men from the Italian provinces, conscious of metropolitan sophistication, and looking to the scholarly
Alexandrian poet
Callimachus for inspiration. Catullus shared the Alexandrian's preference for short poems and wrote within a variety of meters borrowed from Greece, including
Aeolian
Aeolian commonly refers to things related to either of two Greek mythological figures:
* Aeolus (son of Hippotes), ruler of the winds
* Aeolus (son of Hellen), son of Hellen and eponym of the Aeolians
* Aeolians, an ancient Greek tribe thought to ...
forms such as
hendecasyllabic verse, the
Sapphic stanza and
Greater Asclepiad, as well as iambic verses such as the
choliamb and the
iambic tetrameter catalectic (a dialogue meter borrowed from
Old Comedy).
Horace
Quintus Horatius Flaccus (; 8 December 65 – 27 November 8 BC), known in the English-speaking world as Horace (), was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus (also known as Octavian). The rhetorician Quintilian regarded his ' ...
, whose career crossed the divide between the
Roman republic and
empire, followed Catullus' lead in employing Greek lyrical forms, identifying with
Alcaeus of Mytilene, composing
Alcaic stanzas, and also with
Archilochus
Archilochus (; grc-gre, Ἀρχίλοχος ''Arkhilokhos''; c. 680 – c. 645 BC) was a Greek lyric poet of the Archaic period from the island of Paros. He is celebrated for his versatile and innovative use of poetic meters, and is the ea ...
, composing poetic invectives in the
Iambus tradition (in which he adopted the metrical form of the
Epode or "Iambic Distich"). Horace was a contemporary of Virgil and, like the epic poet, he wrote verses in dactylic hexameter, but in a conversational and epistolary style. Virgil's hexameters are generally regarded as "the supreme metrical system of
Latin literature."
[
Richard F. Thomas, ''Virgil: Georgics'' Vol. I, Cambridge University Press (1988), page 28.
]
See also
*
Prosody (Latin) - the structural basis of verse in Latin
References
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Latin Poetry
Poetry movements
Latin-language literature
Poetry by language