Throughout the late republic and early empire, the culture of Rome's elite remained heavily dependent upon Greek models. Painting and sculpture were an integral part of most public places and adorned the luxurious palaces of the rich. Reliefs on public buildings featured mythological subjects or idealized versions of historic events. Private collectors bought reproductions of famous Greek statues from Roman workshops, and a thriving trade existed in bronzes from Greece. In some cases these skillful copies provide the only access to lost originals. Only in portrait statuary did the Romans break with established tradition. Ignoring the Greek tendency to idealize the human form, they produced busts whose photographic realism is a monument to individual men and women.

Architecture, too, abandoned Greek precedent. Temples and theaters recalled Hellenistic models, while other public buildings used the arch and vault construction favored by the Etruscans. Augustus and his successors built baths, aqueducts, warehouses, and stadia for games and chariot races whose scale virtually precluded the post-and-lintel construction of the Greeks. Some structures, such as the Mausoleum built by Augustus for his family and the Pantheon constructed by Hadrian, featured domes that spanned enormous spaces. Increasingly, columns, friezes, and pediments evolved into decorative elements without structural purpose. Engineering and an imperial taste for grandeur triumphed over the aesthetics of simplicity.

In philosophy as in art, the Romans tended to borrow Greek conventions and adapt them to their own purposes. The dominant current in Roman thought was Stoicism. Cicero, Seneca (4 B.C.-A.D. 65), and the emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote extensively on Stoic themes, in part because, as men of affairs, they appreciated the philosophy's moral activism and the comfort it offered a politician in difficult times. Their emphasis, however, was on the practical application of Stoic principles, and their writings added little or nothing to the speculative tradition.

The same might be said of Roman writings on science. Alexandria remained the center of scientific and philosophical inquiry, and Greek the primary language of scientific publication. The most important scientific work in Latin, the Natural History of Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23-79), was little more than a vast compendium of information, much of it false, gleaned by the author from nearly 500 sources--327 of them Greek. The work is important primarily because it summarized ancient knowledge and transmitted it to a later age.

Roman literature was more original than Roman thought. By ancient standards, literacy was widespread in the late republic and early empire (perhaps 15 percent of the population), and books were produced in large numbers. As many as thirty copies at a time could be produced by having a reader dictate to slaves who wrote the words on papyrus scrolls. A more modern form of the book, the codex, made its appearance in the first century B.C. Written on vellum or parchment and bound in leather, it was preferred by lawyers and, later, by Christian scholars who needed to compare several texts at a time and found codices more convenient to handle than scrolls.

The Romans favored practical treatises on agriculture, the mechanical arts, law, and rhetoric. Cicero, as the most successful litigator of his day, was especially valued for his attempt to reconcile traditional jurisprudence with the Stoic idea of natural law and for his writings on oratory. His work, together with that of Quintilian (c. A.D. 35-c. 100), elevated rhetoric to a science and had a profound impact on educational theory. Another literary form unique to Rome was the publication of personal correspondence, with Cicero and Pliny the Younger providing the best and most interesting examples. History, too, was popular, though it was rarely studied in a spirit of objective inquiry. Caesar wrote to advance his political career, while Livy sought to revive republican virtue. Tacitus (c. A.D. 56-c. 120) produced a history of the early emperors from a similar point of view, while his younger contemporary, Suetonius, provided a background of scandalous personal gossip in his Lives of the Caesars. The vices he attributes to the Julio-Claudian emperors transcend normal human capacities. Plutarch (c. A.D. 46- after 119), a Greek whose popular Lives included famous Romans as well as Greeks, pursued a less sensational approach to biography and wrote extensively on ethics.

These contributions, however great, pale by comparison with the poetry that made the Augustan age synonymous with Rome's highest literary achievement. The greatest of the Augustan poets, Virgil (70-19 B.C.), was responsible for the Eclogues, a series of pastoral poems based loosely on Hesiod, and for his masterpiece, The Aeneid, the national epic about the founding of Rome. Both were gratefully received by Augustus as expressions of the civic virtue he was trying to encourage. The Odes and Satires of Horace (65-8 B.C.) were equally acceptable, but the works of Ovid (43 B.C.-A.D. 17) were not. Augustus was sufficiently offended by his Ars Amatoria, a poetic manual of seduction, to exile the poet to a remote town on the Black Sea.

Surprisingly, drama, the most public and political of all art forms, never achieved greater importance in Rome. Greek tragedies aroused enthusiasm among Roman intellectuals, but the public preferred comedy. Plautus, in the late third century B.C., and Terence in the second century B.C., produced works that, though based heavily upon the Greek New Comedy, had a ribald vigor. In later years, public taste turned toward mime and simpleminded farce, while theater attendance declined as gladiatorial combats and similar entertainments became more popular. The nine tragedies of Seneca, so inspiring to the great dramatists of the late Renaissance, were apparently written to be read, not performed.

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