ABSTRACT
Julius Caesar was only the first of the supreme rulers of Rome to experiment in a variety of styles. He was followed, with no very striking success, by Augustus, by Tiberius, by the short-lived Germanicus (a good number of whose lines have, exceptionally, survived), by Nero, Nerva, and Hadrian. Ovid, Lucan, and Juvenal are examples of success achieved in this way, however much redundant rhetoric they carried over into their verses. A few lines are quoted by late Roman grammarians, who perhaps knew only odd excerpts from the poems; and half a dozen titles have survived, some quite uncertain in meaning. During this period, before Cicero’s entry into active political life, is probably to be placed the work on which his poetical reputation must chiefly depend: the Aratea, a translation of a didactic poem in Greek hexameters, the Phaenomena, composed by Aratus at Alexandria in about 275 b.c. on the basis of an earlier prose treatise on astronomy.
