Roman Empire

Rome under the emperors, from Augustus to the end of the Western empire. The literature is the shelf’s centre: Virgil’s Aeneid, on every list, is the poem written to give Rome a past worthy of its power, and it is more troubled by that power than any commissioned poem has a right to be. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is the other epic, all the myths in one poem, and the book from which the Renaissance took its classical imagination. Livy wrote the history of the republic Rome had just lost, and Tacitus the history of what replaced it, in the most compressed and bitter prose in Latin.

The philosophy is Stoic: Epictetus, a freed slave, and Marcus Aurelius, an emperor, teaching the same thing from opposite ends of the world. Their books are the most practical on the site and among the shortest. Plutarch’s Lives, written in Greek under Roman rule, gave every later century its picture of what a great man was, and Shakespeare’s Romans come from them.

The New Testament was written in this era, in Greek, in the eastern provinces, and the Gospels and Paul’s letters are here. So is Plotinus, at the end, the last great pagan philosopher, whose Enneads turned Plato into a mysticism that Augustine would read the year before his conversion.