*Literature.* The principate had two literatures; one Greek, the other Roman. But the forms of literary production were the same in each, and the Roman authors took rank with those of Greece in their respective fields. For the Romans could boast that they had adapted the Latin tongue to the literary types of the older culture world, while preserving in their work a spirit genuinely Roman. *The Augustan age.* The feeling of relief produced by the cessation of the civil wars, and the hopes engendered by the policy of Augustus inspired a group of writers whose genius made the age of Augustus the culminating point in the development of Roman poetry, like the age of Cicero in Roman prose. Foremost among the poets of the new era was Virgil (70–19 B. C.), the son of a small landholder of Mantua, whose _Aeneid_, a national epic, the glorification alike of Rome and of the Julian house, placed him with Homer in the front rank of epic poets for all time. His greatest contemporary was Horace (65–8 B. C.), the son of a freedman from South Italy. It was Horace who first wrote Latin lyrics in the complicated meters of Greece, and whose genial satire and insight into human nature have combined with his remarkable happiness of phrase to make him the delight of cultivated society both in antiquity and modern times. The leading elegiac poets were Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid (43 B. C.–17 A. D.). In his _Fasti_ and _Metamorphoses_ the latter recounted with masterly narrative skill the legends of Greek and Roman mythology. His elegies reveal the spirit of the pleasure-seeking society of new Rome and show the ineffectiveness of the attempt of Augustus to bring about a moral regeneration of the Roman people. This, probably, was the true ground for his banishment from Rome. Livy (59 B. C.–17 A. D.) was the one prose writer of note in the Augustan age. His history of Rome is a great work of art, an _Aeneid_ in prose, which celebrated the past greatness of Rome and the virtues whereby this had been attained—those virtues which Augustus aimed to revive. *The age of Nero.* From Augustus to Nero there are no names of note in Roman literature, but under the latter came a slight reawakening of literary productivity. Seneca (4 B. C.–65 A. D.), a Spaniard from Corduba, Nero’s tutor, minister and victim, is best known as the exponent of the practical Stoic religion and the only Roman tragedian whose works have survived. His nephew Lucan (39–65 A. D.) portrayed in his epic, the _Pharsalia_, the struggle of the republicans against Julius Caesar. His work shows a reawakening of a vain republican idealism and is the counterpart to the Stoic opposition in the senate. Petronius (d. 66 A. D.), the arbiter of the refinements of luxury at Nero’s court, displayed his originality by giving, in the form of a novel, a skilful and lively picture of the society of the freedmen in the Greek municipalities of South Italy.