Latin literature includes the essays, histories, poems, plays, and other writings written in the Latin language. Beginning around the 3rd century BC, it took two centuries to become a dominant literature of Ancient Rome, with many educated Romans still reading and writing in Ancient Greek, as late as Marcus Aurelius (121–180 AD). Latin literature was in many ways a continuation of Greek literature, using many of the same forms.
Latin was the language of the ancient Romans, but it was also the lingua franca of Europe throughout the middle ages, so Latin literature includes not only Roman authors like Cicero, Vergil, Ovid and Lucretius, but also includes European writers after the fall of the Empire from religious writers like St. Augustine (354–430 AD), to secular writers like Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and Spinoza (1632–1677).
Read more about Latin Literature: Characteristics of Latin Literature, Latin in Translation
Famous quotes containing the words latin and/or literature:
“But these young scholars, who invade our hills,
Bold as the engineer who fells the wood,
And travelling often in the cut he makes,
Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not
And all their botany is Latin names.
The old men studied magic in the flowers.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)