ABSTRACT
Our image of classical antiquity stems from two cities at two very different times. One is Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries BC; the other is Rome, three hundred years later. The earlier period is that in which the classical form of narrative history took shape, and the period in which the western tradition of drama was formed. It was the period in which standards of rhetoric and art were created, and the great Athenian experiment of democracy took shape, flourished, and fell. Rome in the last century BC was the time of Cicero, of Catullus, and of Virgil, the giants of Latin literature. It too was a time of incredible chaos, the period in which the republican form of government that had enabled Rome to rise to unparalleled power in the Mediterranean world failed to withstand the pressures that accompanied the
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succeeding centuries, whose inhabitants accorded the status of “classic” to works of earlier generations.
