Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

  • 36 - Poetry

  • from PART VI - LATER PRINCIPATE
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 692-722

  • Summary

    The Latin epic had come to an end with the generation of Statius, Valerius Flaccus and Silius Italicus at the end of the first century AD. Personal elegy, that peculiarly Roman creation, had ended with Ovid. Annianus' and Serenus' poems on the joys of country life follow neither the pattern of Virgil's Eclogues nor that of Tibullus' elegiac poems, but are written in a variety of metres. The earliest major poem surviving from the fourth century is the Evangeliorum libri by Gaius Vettius Aquilinus Juvencus. Ausonius provides an interesting example of the social mobility which literary distinction could bring in the fourth century. Most of Ausonius' poems are in hexameters or elegiac couplets. Prudentius takes over classical forms in language, metre and figures of speech without the body of classical allusion which traditionally accompanied them. Claudian and Prudentius tried to do something new with a very old and by now rigid literary tradition.