LETTERS (to friends, to Trajan, etc.). A specially Roman department of literature. Type followed in France (Madame de Sévigné, etc.). The model for published letters like those of Horace Walpole and Pope. Philosophy CICERO _Academica_, _De Officiis_, etc. A reproducer of Greek systems in popular expositions. SENECA A brilliantly epigrammatic moralizer on old lines of thought. Seneca was favourite reading of moralizers of all European countries after the Renaissance. Fable Phaedrus | PHAEDRUS fl. A.D. 15 FABLES Reproducer of Aesop _See_ “Aesop” in Greek Conspectus. Encyclopaedic Gaius Plinius Secundus | PLINY (the Elder.) fl. A.D. 70 _Natural History_ Storehouse of mediaeval science. III LITERARY CURRENTS OF THE DARK AGES Latin literature, despite its decline after the classical period, is marked by a number of names which merit eminence in their several domains. The era succeeding the silver age hardly deserves to be called leaden. Literature does, indeed, both descend from the Virgilian and Ciceronian style of language, and also adopt a less classic attitude in its themes and sentiment, but it is not without a life and value of its own. Some of the writers are pagan, some are Christian, but their religious professions are not to be determined by their dates. Apuleius, the African writer, a professional rhetorician and man of letters, who wrote his prose _Metamorphoses_ or _Golden Ass_ in the second century, is, of course, a pagan, and by no means a model one. The work just mentioned, probably based on current folk-tales, is entirely fiction, narrating the story of a man turned by sorcery into an ass, and describing his adventures, scandalous, distressful, or amusing, in the hands of robbers and other low types of a society which, we may trust, was not really so bad as it is here painted. Yet into this otherwise not very edifying work there comes the exquisite story of Cupid and Psyche, which has been so frequently translated or recast in literature—best of all by William Morris in the _Earthly Paradise_—and so frequently utilized as the subject of pictorial or plastic art.