Silver Latin Poetry and the Latin Novel

Silver Age: a modern label applied to those Latin poets who wrote
after the death of Augustus

The silver poets write when there was a mighty body of Latin
classics as well (e.g. Virgil, Horace, Ovid). In the beginning the
Latin poets (= also called the Golden Age Poets)
wrote in the consciousness that the Greek literary achievement
loomed large behind them. Those poets pointed the reader’s
attention to the Greek models, in order to draw out the no less
significant divergences from the models. Imitation could thus
become a kind of originality.
Silver Age: Distinctive Talents of a Lesser Order

Statius
Epic poem Thebaid

Silius Italicus
Punica: this work tries to combine both types of epic poetry (the
mythological: cf. Aeneid and the historical: cf. Ennius’ Annales)

Manilius
Didactic poem: Astronomica

Valerius Flaccus
Epic Poem: Argonautica

Seneca
10 tragedies have come down to us under his name, of which one
is certainly and another probably spurious
Seneca turns Attic tragedy towards the gruesome, the sensational,
and the extreme.
In his plays the rhetorical manner is used in the absence of
imagination
Lucan (39-65)

The one man who found a way to reinvigorate the epic genre was
Lucan.

Lucan is one of the most remarkable figures in Latin literature.

He went on to history for his theme but to history told in a wholly

new way.

Bellum civile or Pharsalia: 10 books of his uncompleted epic on

the civil war between Cesar and Pompey

Lucan is different than other epic poets:

o His epic poem has no hero and no single aristeia (the staple
of epic warfare in which an individual hero shows his
prowess in a series of duels): Cesar is portrayed as a villain
and Pompey is far inferior to earlier Romans.
o Lucan constantly involves himself with his characters,
haranguing and mocking them. He does not keep the usual
objectivity of the epic poet. Cp. Virgil: both his Trojans and
Italians excite our admiration and compassion.
o Lucan remodels epic to give it a sardonic and even satiric
tone.
Martial (c. 40-101)

He is the father of the epigram in the modern sense of the term: the
short poem, sometimes very short with a witty point or a twist in
the tail
Juvenal (65-130)

The greatest poet of the Silver Age

His style is dense, muscular and declamatory

Juvenal’s poetry is the Latin poetry most like satire in the modern
sense.

Differently than the poetry off duty of Lucilius and Horace,

Juvenal reveals very little of himself in his poetry.
Juvenal
The Novel

Petronius’ date and identity have been disputed. Most scholars

believe him to be identical with Nero’s “arbiter elegantiae”
compelled by the Emperor to take his own life in AD 66 (cp. the
film “Quo Vadis”)

Tacitus treated the life and death of Petronius in his Annals without
mentioning that he wrote a novel

Satyrica: only one episode of Petronius’ work has come down to

us entire. It is known as the Cena Trimalchionis: Trimalchio’s
dinner party. The rest of the Satyrica survives in very patchy
fragments only.
Scene of Roman banquet