[Sidenote: Literature after Augustus.] With the death of Augustus the greatest period of Roman literature comes to an end. From this time its history is a record of decay, not regularly progressive, to be sure, and not always manifested in the same way, but almost constant, and hardly interrupted even by the appearance of a few writers of genuine ability. With the establishment of peace throughout the Roman Empire, and with the ease and security of travel from province to province, men from all parts of the empire came to Rome for a time and returned to their homes, after, perhaps, imbibing something of the culture of the capital, while others took up their residence permanently in the imperial city. Some men of each class devoted themselves to literature. The elder Seneca belongs to one of these classes, the younger Seneca certainly to the latter. The influence of the provincials upon Roman literature could not fail to be great. In the hands of Spaniards like the Senecas, Latin could hardly remain the city speech, _sermo urbanus_, of the time of Cicero. The evil influence of even the best rhetorical teaching of the time of Augustus has already been mentioned, and as time went on the rhetorical teaching became constantly worse. Moreover, the circumstances of the empire, and especially of the city of Rome, were not favorable to the growth of literature. The peace that followed the unrest of the civil wars had led in the time of Augustus to great literary activity, but the continued peace in the subsequent years, when men’s minds were no longer moved by the remembrance of stirring events, tended to deaden the imagination and to dry up the springs of literary life. In the early part of the first century after Christ there are few important writers either in Greek or Latin. In the city itself the character of the emperor had a powerful effect upon literature.