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Among these literary guides are Cicero, who left an incomparable collection of letters; Catullus, the quintessential poet of love; Horace, the chronicler of a cruel and materialistic Rome; and the Romantics Virgil, Livy, and Seneca. The story concludes with the stark contrast between high-minded Stoicism and the collapse of values witnessed by Tacitus and Juvenal.
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LibraryThing member jerry-book
A good overview of Roman Culture. I did not think it was quite as astute as her Greek book.
LibraryThing member themulhern
In this book Hamilton discusses famous Roman authors, excluding Roman Stoics who Hamilton classifies as essentially Greek, and their cultural context. As ever, she paints with the broadest of strokes. She sets up an idea of opposites, the realism of the Greeks vs. the romanticism of the Romans, and
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claims, as in "The Echo of Greece", that our culture inherits much more from the Romans, and is, hence, rather romantically inclined, and consequently inclined to that corruption of romanticism, sentimentality. This may be essentially true, but, in the book "The Rise of Athens", there is quoted an ancient Spartan poet who seems to be romanticizing dying for ones country with just the verve that Roman poets seem to have brought to that practice. Maybe Hamilton, when she uses Greek, really means "Athenian and similar". Show Less