A Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. J. Wight Duff's A Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age opens with a sweeping survey of imperial Latin writing from Tiberius to Hadrian, setting the era against the "Golden Age" of Cicero, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. This was a time when Roman power expanded, public life changed under monarchy, and literature absorbed both the grandeur and the anxieties of imperial rule. Duff presents the Silver Age as a vivid, original literary world shaped by rhetoric, education, patronage, censorship, and the pressures of political terror. Drawing on a chronological method and a strong sense of historical context, Duff examines prose writers, poets, historians, satirists, technical authors, and emperors themselves as literary forces. He defends Roman creativity against the charge of mere imitation, while showing how declamation, style, and the influence of Virgil and earlier masters shaped expression. From Seneca, Petronius, Lucan, Tacitus, Martial, and Juvenal to Quintilian's critical judgments, the book traces a rich, uneasy age of brilliance, constraint, and lasting literary achievement.