In this now-classic history of Roman civilization, Edith Hamilton
vividly depicts Roman life and spirit as they are revealed by the
greatest writers of the age. Among these literary guides are Cicero, who
left an incomparable collection of letters; Catullus, who was the
quintessential poet of love; Horace, who chronicled a cruel and
materialistic Rome; and the Romantics: Virgil, Livy, and Seneca.
Hamilton concludes her work by contrasting the high-mindedness of
Stoicism with the collapse of values as witnessed by the historian
Tacitus and the satirist Juvenal.