The Climax of the Narrative

2. The Rhetoric of Empire
(III) The Climax of the Narrative

Even if the Augustan age had built no temples, conquered no foreign nations, erected no statues and established no new dynasty, it would still rightly be world-famous for its astonishing output of literature. There were, naturally, great Latin writers before: Catullus of course; Sallust; Julius Caesar himself; and certainly Cicero, for all his sometimes tedious and self-conscious wordiness. Others, such as Tacitus and Pliny, would come after. But by common consent the ‘golden age’ of Latin prose and verse occurred under the patronage, and in the central cases the close personal friendship, of Augustus...