The history of Latin poetry can be understood as the adaptation of

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

models. The verse comedies of

Plautus Titus Maccius Plautus ( ; 254 – 184 BC) was a Roman playwright of the Old Latin period. His comedies are the earliest Latin literary works to have survived in their entirety. He wrote Palliata comoedia, the genre devised by Livius Andro ...

, the earliest surviving examples of

Latin literature Latin literature includes the essays, histories, poems, plays, and other writings written in the Latin language. The beginning of formal Latin literature dates to 240 BC, when the first stage play in Latin was performed in Rome. Latin literatur ...

, 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 (; ; ) 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 noble family, producing Latin translations of Greek works, including Homer ...

, at Rome in 240 BC. Livius translated Greek

New Comedy Ancient Greek comedy () was one of the final three principal dramatic forms in the theatre of classical Greece; the others being tragedy and the satyr play. Greek comedy was distinguished from tragedy by its happy endings and use of comically ...

for Roman audiences, using meters that were basically those of

Greek drama A theatrical culture flourished in ancient Greece from 700 BC. At its centre was the city-state of Athens, which became a significant cultural, political, and religious place during this period, and the theatre was institutionalised there as par ...

, modified to the needs of Latin. His successors

( 254 – 184 BC) and

Terence Publius Terentius Afer (; – ), better known in English as Terence (), was a playwright during the Roman Republic. He was the author of six Roman comedy, comedies based on Greek comedy, Greek originals by Menander or Apollodorus of Carystus. A ...

( 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 Quintus Ennius (; ) was a writer and poet who lived during the Roman Republic. He is often considered the father of Roman poetry. He was born in the small town of Rudiae, located near modern Lecce (ancient ''Calabria'', today Salento), a town ...

(239 – 169 BC), virtually a contemporary of Livius, introduced the traditional meter of Greek epic, the

dactylic hexameter Dactylic hexameter is a form of meter used in Ancient Greek epic and didactic poetry as well as in epic, didactic, satirical, and pastoral Latin poetry. Its name is derived from Greek (, "finger") and (, "six"). Dactylic hexameter consists o ...

, 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 Publius Vergilius Maro (; 15 October 70 BC21 September 19 BC), usually called Virgil or Vergil ( ) in English, was an ancient Rome, ancient Roman poet of the Augustan literature (ancient Rome), Augustan period. He composed three of the most fa ...

and

Ovid Publius Ovidius Naso (; 20 March 43 BC – AD 17/18), known in English as Ovid ( ), was a Augustan literature (ancient Rome), Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horace, with whom he i ...

. 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

Catullus Gaius Valerius Catullus (; ), known as Catullus (), was a Latin neoteric poet of the late Roman Republic. His surviving works remain widely read due to their popularity as teaching tools and because of their personal or sexual themes. Life ...

rich young men from the Italian provinces, conscious of metropolitan sophistication, and looking to the scholarly Alexandrian poet

Callimachus Callimachus (; ; ) was an ancient Greek poet, scholar, and librarian who was active in Alexandria during the 3rd century BC. A representative of Ancient Greek literature of the Hellenistic period, he wrote over 800 literary works, most of which ...

for inspiration. Catullus shared the Alexandrian's preference for short poems and wrote within a variety of meters borrowed from Greece, including Aeolian forms such as hendecasyllabic verse, the

Sapphic stanza The Sapphic stanza, named after the Ancient Greek poet Sappho, is an Aeolic verse form of Quatrain, four lines. Originally composed in quantitative verse and unrhymed, imitations of the form since the Middle Ages typically feature rhyme and accen ...

and Greater Asclepiad, as well as iambic verses such as the

choliamb Choliambic verse (), also known as limping iambs or scazons or halting iambic,. is a form of meter (poetry), meter in poetry. It is found in both Ancient Greek literature, Greek and Latin literature, Latin poetry in the classical antiquity, class ...

and the iambic tetrameter catalectic (a dialogue meter borrowed from

Old Comedy Old Comedy is the first period of the ancient Greek comedy, according to the canonical division by the Alexandrian grammarians.Mastromarco (1994) p.12 The most important Old Comic playwright is Aristophanes – whose works, with their daring pol ...

Horace Quintus Horatius Flaccus (; 8 December 65 BC – 27 November 8 BC), Suetonius, Life of Horace commonly known in the English-speaking world as Horace (), was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus (also known as Octavian). Th ...

, whose career crossed the divide between the

Roman republic The Roman Republic ( ) was the era of Ancient Rome, classical Roman civilisation beginning with Overthrow of the Roman monarchy, the overthrow of the Roman Kingdom (traditionally dated to 509 BC) and ending in 27 BC with the establis ...

and

empire An empire is a political unit made up of several territories, military outpost (military), outposts, and peoples, "usually created by conquest, and divided between a hegemony, dominant center and subordinate peripheries". The center of the ...

, followed Catullus' lead in employing Greek lyrical forms, identifying with

Alcaeus of Mytilene Alcaeus of Mytilene (; , ''Alkaios ho Mutilēnaios''; – BC) was a lyric poet from the Greek island of Lesbos who is credited with inventing the Alcaic stanza. He was included in the canonical list of nine lyric poets by the scholars of H ...

, composing

Alcaic stanza The Alcaic stanza is a Greek lyrical meter, an Aeolic verse form traditionally believed to have been invented by Alcaeus, a lyric poet from Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, about 600 BC. The Alcaic stanza and the Sapphic stanza named for Alca ...

s, and also with

Archilochus Archilochus (; ''Arkhílokhos''; 680 – c. 645 BC) was a Iambus (genre) , iambic poet of the Archaic Greece, Archaic period from the island of Paros. He is celebrated for his versatile and innovative use of poetic meters, and is the earliest ...

, composing poetic invectives in the Iambus tradition (in which he adopted the metrical form of the

Epode According to one meaning of the word, an epode is the third part of an ancient Greek choral ode that follows the strophe and the antistrophe and completes the movement. The word epode is also used to refer to the second (shorter) line of a two-l ...

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

." Richard F. Thomas, ''Virgil: Georgics'' Vol. I, Cambridge University Press (1988), page 28.

References

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Latin Poetry Poetry movements Latin-language literature Poetry by language

History

See also

References