In the late 40 s and early 30 s, Gallus had written four books of elegies, now almost entirely lost. The genre appears to have been invented by Cornelius Gallus, a friend of Virgil and one of Octavian/Augustus’s most trusted lieutenants. Love elegy also flourished in this decade. Horace had published his Satires and Epodes in the 30 s, and was to publish the first three of his four books of Odes in 23 BC. He was now at work on his last and greatest poem, the Aeneid, an epic to rival both the Iliad and the Odyssey. Virgil had already established his reputation with his Eclogues, pastoral poetry in imitation of the third-century BC Sicilian Greek poet Theocritus, and with his Georgics, a didactic poem on farming in four books, modelled on theWorks and Days, composed in the eighth century BC by Hesiod, Greece’s earliest literate poet. In the 20 s BC, the literary salons controlled by Augustus’s chief political adviser, Maecenas, and by his military commander, Messalla Corvinus, provided a galaxy of great poets with a venue for the recitation of their latest works. It is universally agreed, however, that the poetic achievements of no other period can stand comparison with those of the age of Augustus, the first emperor, who attained sole rule with his victory over Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, and maintained it ever more firmly throughout his long reign – longer than that of any later emperor – eventually to die peacefully in his bed, a privilege enjoyed by very few of his rivals and enemies, The years before and after the richly deserved assassination of Domitian in AD 96 produced the stiletto wit of Martial’s epigrams and the powerful satires of Juvenal, as marvellously trenchant and memorable as they are intolerant and appalling. Nero (ruled AD 54 –68 ) had a high opinion of his own poetic talents, but they were quite eclipsed by the tragedies of his adviser, Seneca the Younger, and by the Civil War, the political epic of Seneca’s nephew, Lucan. Many periods in Rome’s long history produced great poets.From the end of the Republic in the mid-first century BC, we have Lucretius’s Epicurean masterpiece, On the Nature of Things, and the kaleidoscopic variety of Catullus’s oeuvre, ranging from the coarse obscenities of political epigram, through beautiful love lyrics, to the sophistication of epicizing mythological narrative.

The metamorphoses