A History of Roman Literature

The Project Gutenberg eBook, A History of Roman Literature, by Harold North Fowler
AUGUSTUS. Bust in the Museum of Fine Arts. Boston.
TWENTIETH CENTURY TEXT-BOOKS
BY HAROLD N. FOWLER, Ph.D. PROFESSOR IN THE COLLEGE FOR WOMEN OF WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY
NEW YORK AND LONDON D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
Copyright, 1903 By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY PRINTED AT THE APPLETON PRESS, NEW YORK, U. S. A.
This book is intended primarily for use as a text-book in schools and colleges. I have therefore given more dates and more details about the lives of authors than are in themselves important, because dates are convenient aids to memory, as they enable the learner to connect his new knowledge with historical facts he may have learned before, while biographical details help to endow authors with something of concrete personality, to which the learner can attach what he learns of their literary and intellectual activity.
Extracts from Latin authors are given, with few exceptions, in English translation. I considered the advisability of giving them in Latin, but concluded that extracts in Latin would probably not be read by most young readers, and would therefore do less good than even imperfect translations. Moreover, the texts of the most important works are sure to be at hand in the schools, and books of selections, such as Cruttwell and Banton’s Specimens of Roman Literature , Tyrrell’s Anthology of Latin Poetry , and Gudeman’s Latin Literature of the Empire , are readily accessible. I am responsible for all translations not accredited to some other translator. In making my translations, I have employed blank verse to represent Latin hexameters; but the selections from the Æneid are given in Conington’s rhymed version, and in some other cases I have used translations of hexameters into metres other than blank verse.
In writing of the origin of Roman comedy, I have not mentioned the dramatic satura . Prof. George L. Hendrickson has pointed out (in the American Journal of Philology , vol. xv, pp. 1-30) that the dramatic satura never really existed, but was invented in Roman literary history because Aristotle, whose account of the origin of comedy was closely followed by the Roman writers, found the origin of Greek comedy in the satyr-drama.