ABSTRACT
The partition of the Roman world between Octavian and Antony in 42 B.C., even the battle of Actium in 31, and the Principate of Augustus, at first affected the great intellectual currents prevailing in Rome only imperceptibly. Political changes take time to influence the civilization of a people, and even when they force it to turn in new directions they do not cut previous developments short. So we see the literary movement represented by Catullus continuing down to the end of Augustus’s reign, and, in spite of the moral campaign of the Sovereign, the manners of the upper classes at the end of the Republican epoch also survive. The conflict between the old spirit and the new order was to produce tragic incidents in the family of Augustus himself, and the last representative of poetical dilettantism, Ovid, was to find his brilliant career pitilessly cut short and to end in the melancholy exile of Tomi.
