ABSTRACT
Readers of Latin literature are accustomed to think in terms of a classical period in the late Republic and the reign of Augustus, followed by a barren period of nearly half a century, which ends with the flowering of Silver Latin under Nero, the Flavians and early Antonines. As regards writers of prose this impression does not stand up to reflection. Seneca, the versatile genius of the Neronian age, has left several works written under the Emperors Gaius and Claudius, while the great Silver Latin prose authors, Tacitus and Pliny, come long after Nero, with only the didactic writers Columella and Quintilian to speak for the Neronian and Flavian periods. But in poetry and the mixed genre of Menippean satire the impression is largely true. In epic we pass from Virgil and Ovid direct to Lucan, in pastoral from Virgil to Calpurnius Siculus and the Einsiedeln Eclogues, in verse satire from Horace to Persius, and in Menippean satire from Varro to Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis and Petronius’ Satyricon.
