Classifieds

Commentary

 
The historian Livy, whose influence with the founding generation was the topic of the previous installment, died in 17 C.E. In the two centuries following, the Roman Empire produced many other influential writers.
The Roman Empire had a pair of official languages: Greek in the eastern part of the realm and Latin in the West. Among those who wrote in Greek were Plutarch and the authors of the Christian New Testament. Among those who composed in Latin were:

Lucan, an epic poet;
Seneca the Elder and Quintilian, both teachers of rhetoric;
Seneca the Younger (son of the elder Seneca), a philosopher, playwright, and imperial adviser;
the elder Pliny, an admiral in the Roman navy and author of a massive encyclopedia;
his nephew, the younger Pliny—an accountant, lawyer, consul, and provincial governor—who left behind a magnificent collection of letters;
Petronius, a member of the Emperor Nero's court who crafted what might be the first novel;
Lucius Apuleius, a philosopher-turned-novelist;
Gaius Suetonius, who wrote engaging biographies;
a collection of famous legal scholars—Gaius, Papinian, Ulpian, and others; and
Cornelius Tacitus, the greatest Roman historian.

Of course, schoolboys had no time to read them all. Even the minority of young men who attended college were not expected to do so, and only those authors commonly studied had a direct influence on the Constitution. The works studied most often were the New Testament, the histories of Tacitus, and the biographies of Plutarch. Tacitus is the subject of the next essay, and Plutarch is the subject of this....