ABSTRACT
THE literature of the Augustan Age was both voluminous and of high merit. Augustus’ achievement inspired men of letters. He had done more than make life and property secure, he had restored discipline and order in every field of human activity. Therewith a firm sense of values and ease of mind had returned; men were no longer wandering about bewildered in a moral and spiritual vacuum, and their reassurance was reflected in literature. Troublous times usually breed strained and turgid writing; but Augustan literature is the very reverse of this. Its mere externals make that sufficiently obvious, for Augustan verse exhibits a technical excellence, a mastery of form that results when poets are confident of their standards, and the prosodic uncertainties of the period of the Republic disappear. A comparison of Vergil’s hexameters with those of Lucretius, of Horace’s sapphics with those of Catullus, or of Tibullus’ elegiac couplets with those of Catullus is instructive in this regard. Nor is this certainty of touch confined to poetry: the prose writers, too, had mastered their medium.
