*The Flavian era.* Under the Flavians, Pliny the Elder (23–79 A. D.), a native of Cisalpine Gaul, compiled his _Natural History_, which he aimed to make an encyclopaedia of information on the whole world of nature. It is a work of monumental industry but displays a lack of critical acumen and scientific training. At about the same time there taught in Rome the Spaniard Quintilian (d. 95 A. D.), who wrote on the theory and practice of rhetoric, expressing in charming prose the Ciceronian ideal of life and education. His countryman Martial (d. 102 A. D.) gave in satiric epigrams glimpses of the meaner aspects of contemporary life. *Tacitus and his contemporaries.* The freer atmosphere of the government of Nerva and Trajan allowed the senatorial aristocracy to voice feelings carefully suppressed under the terror of Domitian. Their spokesman was Tacitus (55–116 A. D.), a man of true genius, who ranks next to Thucydides as the representative of artistic historical writing in ancient times. His _Treatise on the Orators_, his _Life of Agricola_, and his descriptive account of the German peoples (_Germania_) were preludes to two great historical works, the _Annals_ and the _Histories_, which together covered the period from 14–96 A. D. His attitude is strongly influenced by the persecutions of senators under Domitian, and is the expression of his personal animosity and that of the descendants of the older republican nobility towards the principate in general. A friend of Tacitus, the younger Pliny (62–113 A. D.), imitated Cicero in collecting and publishing his letters. This correspondence is valuable as an illustration of the life and literary diletantism of educated circles of the day, as also for the light it throws upon the administrative policies of Trajan. An embittered critic of the age was the satirist Juvenal (d. about 130 A. D.), from Aquinum in Italy, who wrote from a stoical standpoint but with little learning and narrow vision. Somewhat later the first literary history of Rome was written by Suetonius (75–150 A. D.), who is better known as the author of the _Lives of the Caesars_ (from Julius to Domitian), a series of gossipy narratives which set the style for future historical writing in Rome. With Hadrian begins the period of archaism in Roman literature, that is, an artificial return to the Latin of Cato, Ennius and Plautus, an unmistakable symptom of intellectual sterility.