The Augustan Age

4 Key excerpts on "The Augustan Age"

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  History of the Roman Empire 27 BC to 180 AD

  • J. B. Bury(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Ozymandias Press

    (Publisher)

  LITERATURE OF The Augustan Age. ~ Sect. I. Latin Poetry. Latin literature was affected seriously, and in many ways, by the fall of the Republic and the foundation of the Empire. The Augustan Age itself was brilliant, but after The Augustan Age literature rapidly declined. The most conspicuous figures in the world of letters under Augustus had outlived their youth under the Republic; some of them had served on the losing side. But these soon became reconciled to the new order of things. The Emperor drew men to himself by virtue of the peace and security which he had established (cunctos dulcedine otii pettexit); and it was his special object to patronize men of literary talent and engage their services for the support of his policy. His efforts were successful; he won not only flattery, but sympathy for the new age which he had inaugurated; he enlisted in his cause, not only timeservers, but the finest spirits of the day. Although the Augustan literature is certainly marked by a vein of flattery to the court, and by a lack of republican independence, yet we cannot but recognize a genuine enthusiasm for the new age, for the peace which it had brought after the long civil wars, and for the greatness of the Roman Empire. And, from a literary point of view, The Augustan Age ranks among the most brilliant in the history of the world; below the Periclean, perhaps below the Elizabethan, but certainly far above that of Louis XIV. It is true that the cessation of the political life of the Republic necessarily meant the decline of oratory; it is true that historians could no longer treat contemporary events with free and independent criticism. It is true likewise that the severe style of old Latin prose begins to degenerate, and that poetry lays aside its popular elements and becomes more strictly artificial. In fact the poets deprecate popularity and despise the public. Horace’s cry “Odi profanum vulgus et arceo” is characteristic of the age

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  The Eighteenth Century

  The Context of English Literature

  • Pat Rogers, Pat Rogers(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Bee to an ‘Account of The Augustan Age in England’. This contains a rapid survey of English literary history, with a strong emphasis on the development of a pure and expressive style. Goldsmith concludes that the highpoint was reached around the time of Queen Anne, ‘or some years before’, and it is in the era of Congreve, Prior, Addison and Bolingbroke that he locates the true ‘Augustan’ phase. By our standards Goldsmith seems unduly preoccupied with eloquence for its own sake, and his examples are not always those we should choose in order to establish creative merit. Nevertheless the essay tells us a good deal regarding the eighteenth century’s idea of itself. Writers of the period were the first to carry the burden of the past, in the sense that they were more selfconscious and aware of their genealogy than medieval and Renaissance authors had been. Actually they were encouraged, rather than depressed, when they contemplated their historical situation. Rejecting the Middle Ages as gothic and monkish, they looked on most Renaissance literature as for the most part an amiable and blundering attempt to create an indigenous tradition. To be an Augustan, in their terms, was to be engaged in sweeping the recent past right away; it was to be a reformer and an improver. It was an urgent, highly contemporaneous enterprise; it was to be, paradoxically, modern.

  The cultural map

  There were, of course, high standards to be maintained and models to be studied for the purpose of ultimate emulation. In so far as the pantheon was classical, it was predominantly the grandeur of Rome rather than the glory of Greece that most appealed to readers and writers. In so far as more recent literature was concerned, there was a thin line of approved English authors: these included Shakespeare, Spenser, Ben Jonson, Milton and Dryden. But the greater challenge was provided by France, especially the writers in Louis XIV’s long reign. Both theory and practice were heavily indebted to French example, and although this influence was less readily acknowledged in the middle of the eighteenth century than it had been at the start the traces can still be picked up. Modern scholarship has been inclined to qualify the extent to which classical and French models influenced taste. It has been argued that the declared allegiance to ancient writers sometimes went with a shallow knowledge of classical texts. Similarly it has been contended that a strong native tradition was always ready to carry on a resistance movement against the fashionable and Frenchified court. However, it can scarcely be denied that most of the acknowledged masters were classical or French (apart from Cervantes, other European writers counted for little); and it would be unwise to underestimate the effect over time of this constant tutelage from outside.

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  English Literature: Modern Home University Library of Modern Knowledge

  • Mair, George Herbert(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • pubOne.info

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER V   THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE

    The student of literature, when he passes in his reading from the age of Shakespeare and Milton to that of Dryden and Pope, will be conscious of certain sharply defined differences between the temper and styles of the writers of the two periods. If besides being a student of literature he is also (for this is a different thing) a student of literary criticism he will find that these differences have led to the affixing of certain labels – that the school to which writers of the former period belong is called "Romantic" and that of the latter "Classic," this "Classic" school being again overthrown towards the end of the eighteenth century by a set of writers who unlike the Elizabethans gave the name "Romantic" to themselves. What is he to understand by these two labels; what are the characteristics of "Classicism" and how far is it opposite to and conflicting with "Romanticism"? The question is difficult because the names are used vaguely and they do not adequately cover everything that is commonly put under them. It would be difficult, for instance, to find anything in Ben Jonson which proclaims him as belonging to a different school from Dryden, and perhaps the same could be said in the second and self-styled period of Romanticism of the work of Crabbe. But in the main the differences are real and easily visible, even though they hardly convince us that the names chosen are the happiest that could be found by way of description.

    This period of Dryden and Pope on which we are now entering sometimes styled itself The Augustan Age of English poetry. It grounded its claim to classicism on a fancied resemblance to the Roman poets of the golden age of Latin poetry, the reign of the Emperor Augustus. Its authors saw themselves each as a second Vergil, a second Ovid, most of all a second Horace, and they believed that their relation to the big world, their assured position in society, heightened the resemblances. They endeavoured to form their poetry on the lines laid down in the critical writing of the original Augustan age as elaborated and interpreted in Renaissance criticism. It was tacitly assumed – some of them openly asserted it – that the kinds, modes of treatment and all the minor details of literature, figures of speech, use of epithets and the rest, had been settled by the ancients once and for all. What the Greeks began the critics and authors of the time of Augustus had settled in its completed form, and the scholars of the Renaissance had only interpreted their findings for modern use. There was the tragedy, which had certain proper parts and a certain fixed order of treatment laid down for it; there was the heroic poem, which had a story or "fable," which must be treated in a certain fixed manner, and so on. The authors of the "Classic" period so christened themselves because they observed these rules. And they fancied that they had the temper of the Augustan time – the temper displayed in the works of Horace more than in those of any one else – its urbanity, its love of good sense and moderation, its instinctive distrust of emotion, and its invincible good breeding. If you had asked them to state as simply and broadly as possible their purpose they would have said it was to follow nature, and if you had enquired what they meant by nature it would turn out that they thought of it mainly as the opposite of art and the negation of what was fantastic, tortured, or far sought in thinking or writing. The later "Romantic" Revival, when it called itself a return to nature, was only claiming the intention which the classical school itself had proclaimed as its main endeavour. The explanation of that paradox we shall see presently; in the meantime it is worth looking at some of the characteristics of classicism as they appear in the work of the "Classic" authors.

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  Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches — Volume 2

  • Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  The history of every literature with which we are acquainted confirms, we think, the principles which we have laid down. In Greece we see the imaginative school of poetry gradually fading into the critical. Aeschylus and Pindar were succeeded by Sophocles, Sophocles by Euripides, Euripides by the Alexandrian versifiers. Of these last, Theocritus alone has left compositions which deserve to be read. The splendour and grotesque fairyland of the Old Comedy, rich with such gorgeous hues, peopled with such fantastic shapes, and vocal alternately with the sweetest peals of music and the loudest bursts of elvish laughter, disappeared forever. The master-pieces of the New Comedy are known to us by Latin translations of extraordinary merit. From these translations, and from the expressions of the ancient critics, it is clear that the original compositions were distinguished by grace and sweetness, that they sparkled with wit, and abounded with pleasing sentiment; but that the creative power was gone. Julius Caesar called Terence a half Menander,—a sure proof that Menander was not a quarter Aristophanes.

  The literature of the Romans was merely a continuation of the literature of the Greeks. The pupils started from the point at which their masters had, in the course of many generations arrived. They thus almost wholly missed the period of original invention. The only Latin poets whose writings exhibit much vigour of imagination are Lucretius and Catullus. The Augustan Age produced nothing equal to their finer passages.

  In France that licensed jester, whose jingling cap and motley coat concealed more genius than ever mustered in the saloon of Ninon or of Madame Geoffrin, was succeeded by writers as decorous and as tiresome as gentlemen ushers.

  The poetry of Italy and of Spain has undergone the same change. But nowhere has the revolution been more complete and violent than in England. The same person who, when a boy, had clapped his thrilling hands at the first representation of the Tempest might, without attaining to a marvellous longevity, have lived to read the earlier works of Prior and Addison. The change, we believe, must, sooner or later, have taken place. But its progress was accelerated, and its character modified, by the political occurrences of the times, and particularly by two events, the closing of the theatres under the Commonwealth, and the restoration of the House of Stuart.

  We have said that the critical and poetical faculties are not only distinct, but almost incompatible. The state of our literature during the reigns of Elizabeth and James the First is a strong confirmation of this remark. The greatest works of imagination that the world has ever seen were produced at that period. The national taste, in the meantime, was to the last degree detestable. Alliterations, puns, antithetical forms of expression lavishly employed where no corresponding opposition existed between the thoughts expressed, strained allegories, pedantic allusions, everything, in short, quaint and affected, in matter and manner, made up what was then considered as fine writing. The eloquence of the bar, the pulpit, and the council-board, was deformed by conceits which would have disgraced the rhyming shepherds of an Italian academy. The king quibbled on the throne. We might, indeed, console ourselves by reflecting that his majesty was a fool. But the chancellor quibbled in concert from the wool-sack: and the chancellor was Francis Bacon. It is needless to mention Sidney and the whole tribe of Euphuists; for Shakspeare himself, the greatest poet that ever lived, falls into the same fault whenever he means to be particularly fine. While he abandons himself to the impulse of his imagination, his compositions are not only the sweetest and the most sublime, but also the most faultless, that the world has ever seen. But, as soon as his critical powers come into play, he sinks to the level of Cowley; or rather he does ill what Cowley did well. All that is bad in his works is bad elaborately, and of malice aforethought. The only thing wanting to make them perfect was, that he should never have troubled himself with thinking whether they were good or not. Like the angels in Milton, he sinks "with compulsion and laborious flight." His natural tendency is upwards. That he may soar, it is only necessary that he should not struggle to fall. He resembles an American Cacique, who, possessing in unmeasured abundance the metals which in polished societies are esteemed the most precious, was utterly unconscious of their value, and gave up treasures more valuable than the imperial crowns of other countries, to secure some gaudy and far-fetched but worthless bauble, a plated button, or a necklace of coloured glass.

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