Returning to the greater poets of the Golden Age, we have still to consider Catullus (87-54 B. C.) and Ovid (43 B. C.-18 A. D.). We have 116 exquisite lyrical poems of Catullus, a man of leisure and wealth who largely wrote verse about love for his lady-friends. Catullus is freer in his sentiments and expressions than Horace, but the fourth great Latin poet, Ovid, was the most outspoken of them all. In the gay society of Rome he published _Songs of Love_, _The Art of Love_, and _Remedies of Love_. But these are so far from reflecting the whole life of Rome that Ovid was exiled for his licentious poems--the real reason is said to have been an entanglement with the Emperor’s daughter--and in exile he wrote his more serious works. His masterpiece is the _Metamorphoses_, a mixture of history, legend and mythology in rich and very accomplished verse. Another distinguished poet of the first century is Lucan, whose _Pharsalia_ (a poem on the civil war) has a high place in literature. Of the historians Julius Caesar (100-44 B. C.), a very cultivated man as well as a great general, has left us _Commentaries_ on his campaigns, especially in Gaul; plain, straightforward accounts of his actions in one of the easiest of Latin styles. Sallust (86-34) is more of a literary man as well as historian, but his chief work is lost and his _Conspiracy of Catiline_ and _War Against Jugurtha_ are not masterpieces. The two most famous historians of Rome are Livy (59-17 B. C.) and Tacitus (55-117 A. D.). Livy belongs to the older Roman world, and his immense history of Rome in 142 books (only 35 of which have come down to us) is more patriotic than critical. Tacitus, on the other hand, falls in the period when the Stoic emperors raised the tone of the declining Empire. His _History_ and _Annals_ (of later Roman times) are both historical and literary classics: severe and very condensed (and difficult to read) in style, austerely moral in sentiment, and based on precise documents. In the _Annals_ there is a famous reference to Christ and Nero’s persecution of the Christians, the genuineness of which is disputed. It seems to me sound enough in style but too late in date to be important. Cicero, the greatest Roman orator, and a statesman and philosopher, belongs to the earlier period (106-43 B. C.), the close of the Republic. His style is a standard of Latin, yet it is comparatively easy to read. His speeches (chiefly delivered in the law-court) are models of oratory, avoiding florid rhetoric and relying, like those of Demosthenes, on force of language and skill of construction. He has left us also the best philosophical essays in the Latin language--the books _On Duty_ are most interesting from the ethical point of view--and his many letters are excellent literature and afford valuable pictures of the time.