CALPURNIUS PISO: “Annals;” style barren and lifeless. SISENNA (119-67 B.C.): History of Rome from the destruction of the city by the Gauls. ORATORS. GALBA (180-136 B.C.): first master of Greek rhetoric; vehemence and artifice his characteristics. CARBO (164-119 B.C.): an unscrupulous, but sweet-voiced and powerful pleader. RUTILIUS (158-78 B.C.): a distinguished jurist. CATULUS: graceful and elegant; a master of pure Latin. COTTA: soft-spoken and courteous; his eloquence of the sweet, persuasive kind. Study of grammar introduced by Crates, who, fortunately for the Romans, broke his leg while on an embassy to their city from the king of Pergamus (156 B.C.), and during his convalescence lectured on philology at Rome. The earliest works on Roman law were produced during this period. CHAPTER III. _GOLDEN AGE OF ROMAN LITERATURE._ (B.C. 80-14 A.D.) =Divisions and Ornaments.=—The Golden Age, which now engages our attention, is naturally divided into two distinct periods, bearing the names of Cicero, the greatest of Roman writers, and Augustus, the founder of the empire and patron of letters. In the Ciceronian Period (80-43 B.C.), a stormy era of conspiracy as well as conquest—marked by Catiline’s formidable attempt to destroy the commonwealth, by the civil war of Cæsar and Pompey, and the murder of these renowned leaders—political eloquence and history monopolized the attention of the master minds of Rome. As a consequence, Latin prose matured early in the golden age; while poetry boasted of no ornaments until, at the close of the Ciceronian Period, Lucretius penned his philosophical poem “On the Nature of Things,” and Catullus produced his erotic odes and elegies. In the Augustan Period (B.C. 42-14 A.D.), the greatest of Roman poets, Virgil and Horace, lived and wrote, prose playing a secondary part. Tibullus and Propertius put forth their sweet elegies, and Ovid his amatory pieces. Even the pages of Livy’s history are aglow with poetical coloring. But the blossom was as transient as it was beautiful, and expanded only to die. [Illustration: ORNAMENTS OF THE GOLDEN AGE HORACE CICERO VIRGIL] PROSE WRITERS OF THE CICERONIAN PERIOD.