Augustan Age

Augustan Age, one of the most illustrious periods in Latin literary history, from approximately 43 bc to ad 18; together with the preceding Ciceronian period (q.v.), it forms the Golden Age (q.v.) of Latin literature. Marked by civil peace and prosperity, the age reached its highest literary expression in poetry, a polished and sophisticated verse generally addressed to a patron or to the emperor Augustus and dealing with themes of patriotism, love, and nature. One decade alone, 29 to 19 bc, saw the publication of Virgil’s Georgics and the completion of the Aeneid; the appearance of Horace’s Odes, Books I–III, and Epistles, Book I; the elegies (Books I–III) of Sextus Propertius, a member of a group of promising young poets under the patronage of Gaius Maecenas; and Books I–II of the elegies of Tibullus, who was under the patronage of Messalla. During those 10 years also, Livy began his monumental history of Rome, and another historian, Pollio, was writing his important but lost history of recent events. Ovid, the author of Metamorphoses, a mythological history of the world from the creation to the Augustan Age, was the last great writer of the Golden Age; his death in exile in ad 17 marked the close of the period.

By extension, the name Augustan Age also is applied to a “classical” period in the literature of any nation, especially to the 18th century in England and, less frequently, to the 17th century—the age of Corneille, Racine, and Molière—in France. Some critics prefer to limit the English Augustan Age to a period covered by the reign of Queen Anne (1702–14), when writers such as Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele, John Gay, and Matthew Prior flourished. Others, however, would extend it backward to include John Dryden and forward to take in Samuel Johnson.