The Oxford History Of The Classical World

spent the last three years of his life in study and writing: a retirement not unlike Cicero's, and perhaps modeled on it. His tr ...

Pliny's stylistic ambitions were not matched by competence or taste. He does not appear to have mastered either the periodic ele ...

Statue-Group Of Laocoon And His Sons (c. A.D. 10-30), one of the few works of art described in Pliny the Elders Natural History ...

The Parallel Lives were dedicated to Q. Sosius Senecio, an acquaintance of Pliny, and a great man-four times consul-of Trajan's ...

Painting Of Antony And Cleopatra by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1885): a late-Victorian romantic view of the affair which Plutarch ...

Philosophy and myth are not, however, the only elements in his dialogues: there is also a dramatic dimension. Thus he wrote The ...

Many of Lucian's dialogues are enlargements of the techniques of the 'miniatures'; but we also have-among nearly eighty books wh ...

Cosmological Mosaic At Merida (Emerita) In Spain (mid second century A.D.). The imagery of the pavement has been compared with t ...

An easterly breeze got up, and, as we proceeded, a brisk east wind, which broke out in the end into a fearful gale. Up went the ...

Silver Latin Poetry And The Latin Novel (By Richard Jenkyns) The Silver Age: Problems and Solutions The word 'silver', applied ...

an issue that was in the air as never before. It is intriguing, too, to find Statius, near the end of the century, concluding hi ...

Hylas Seized By Water-Nymphs: painting by William Etty (1833). This romantic episode from the voyage of the Argonauts was descri ...

Silver Dish From Kaiseraugst (fourth century A.D.) depicting scenes from the early life of Achilles, the subject of Statius' Ach ...

own life at the age of twenty-six; by this time he had already composed numerous works, all of which have perished except for th ...

it a sardonic and even a satiric tone. The blend of political passion and rhetorical conceits is the essence of the Pharsalia. I ...

most intriguing 'ifs' of Latin literary history: had he survived, would he have developed into a great master, or was he by natu ...

The Death Of Astyanax: terracotta relief of the late first century B.C. or the early first century A.D. In front of a typical th ...

Martial (c.40-101), as we have seen (above, p. 680), also took trouble to set himself at a distance from the grander poets; but ...

on display. Juvenal, by contrast, reveals very little of himself. His voice is exceedingly distinctive, but we learn next to not ...

What a sight it was, what a picture it would make, when the Gaetulian monster carried the one- eyed commander. And the great man ...