Latin Literature and Authors
What the literature domain tests
You must match authors to genres, works, and periods, and recognize the rhetorical and metrical features that exam passages display.
Periods and authors
- Republic: Plautus and Terence (comedy), Cato (prose), Cicero (oratory, philosophy, letters), Caesar (Commentarii), Sallust (monographs), Lucretius (De Rerum Natura, didactic epic), Catullus (lyric and invective).
- Augustan: Virgil (Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid), Horace (Odes, Satires, Epistles), Ovid (Metamorphoses, Amores), Livy (history).
- Imperial: Seneca (tragedy, letters), Lucan (Pharsalia), Petronius (Satyricon), Tacitus (Annals, Histories), Pliny the Younger (letters, Panegyricus), Juvenal (satire), Apuleius (Metamorphoses).
Meter
Dactylic hexameter consists of six feet of dactyls (–uu) and spondees (--), with a caesura and a fixed cadence. The elegiac couplet is a hexameter followed by a pentameter. Horace's lyric meters vary by poem.
Rhetorical devices
Anaphora (repetition at the start of clauses), chiasmus (ABBA order), hyperbaton (separated words), hendiadys (two nouns for one idea), litotes (understatement by negation), asyndeton (omitted conjunctions), polysyndeton (many conjunctions).
Worked example
A line reads arma virumque cano. Identify the device and the meter. Arma virumque pairs two nouns with the enclitic -que, and cano is the verb: 'I sing of arms and the man'. The meter is dactylic hexameter; -que attaches to virum, so it does not start a new word. The phrase is a compressed pairing, not hendiadys.
Traps
- Crediting Plautus with inventing Greek New Comedy rather than adapting it.
- Mixing up the plots of the Aeneid and the Odyssey.
- Calling every repetition anaphora; check the position.
- Forgetting that -que is enclitic and does not change the previous word's meaning.