Roman Literature Flashcards
Famous Roman poet. From a Gallic family (he interacted with Caesr), he wrote many love poems to a woman named “Lesbia.” His vivid sexual imagery offended many in his time. Famous poems include “Ave Atque Vale” and the couplet “I hate and I love.”
Catullus
Poet of many famous Odes and Satires as well as the hymn Carmen Secularae. He coined the phrases “Carpe Diem” and “Duce et Decorum est pro patria mori.
Horace
Famous Horace work written to the Pisos family, sometimes called the Epistle to the Pisones. HUGE influence on later European literature, and is the origin of many literary phrases like “In Media Res” and “Deus ex Machina.”
Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry)
This famous Roman poet, exiled to the island of Tomis for what he called “a poem and a mistake,” wrote many famous poems like Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), Fasti (Festivals - He writes about the Roman Calendar), as well as Tristia (Sorrows) and Letters from the Black Sea which he wrote from and about his exile.
Ovid
This magnum opus of Ovid is a 15-book long poem narrating mythological history from the creation to the apotheosis of Julius Caesar.
Metamorphoses
This famous Ovid work is made up of 15 short letters in the form of couplets from “Heroines” in Greek mythology to their lovers.
For example, the first one is this “This your Penelope sends to you, too-slow Ulysses;
A letter in return does me no good; come yourself!”
Heroides
Most famous Roman playwright of The Menaechmi, in which one twin gets mistaken for another twin’s prostitute and later her husband before they reunite. The Menaechmi was the inspiration for Comedy of Errors by Shakespeare.
He also wrote “Pot of Gold” in which a man guards the title object religiously and paranoidly.
Plautus
Greek playwright who wrote more sophisticated plays than Plautus, including his work The Eunuch.
Terence
This Roman wrote three famous works: The Eclogues, interpreting the turbulence in Rome in a mythic way, The Georgics (Georgika is Greek for Agriculture), concerning rural life and farming, and his magnum opus The Aeneid.
Virgil
