Origin and Overview: Rome was founded in the 8th century BC. In the area south of Truglia and west of Tiber River where the ancient Romans lived, the establishment of the Latin Jupiter Festival, including literary and artistic activities, should be no later than the 7th century BC. Influenced by the Trullian civilization, Latin nations, including the Romans, gradually formed their own local culture.
Roman culture mainly inherited Greek culture and gradually developed. During the Hellenistic period, Rome introduced many Greek works for translation and imitation. After Rome destroyed Greece in BC 146, it took all Greek myths, poems and dramas for its own, and found many slaves who were captured from Greece as tutors. They wrote poems and studied various sciences, which made ancient Roman literature dyed with a strong Greek color. Take myth as an example. After contact with Greek culture, many Roman gods were combined with Greek gods. For example, Jupiter, the main god believed by the Romans, is equivalent to Zeus in Greece, and his wife Juno is equivalent to Hera. As for Apollo, the sun god, and the muse, they went straight into Roman mythology, even without changing their names.
Of course, ancient Roman literature is not all an imitation of ancient Greek literature, because it is the product of Roman society after all, and its language is Latin. In western academic circles, ancient Roman literature is regarded as a part of Latin literature in a broad sense. Different from the maritime people in ancient Greece, ancient Rome belonged to an inland people, who lived mainly by farming and grazing, and had the characteristics of vulgarity, ignorance and simplicity of ancient farmers and herdsmen. After the founding of People's Republic of China (PRC), ancient Rome advocated force and pursued the prosperity and perfection of society and state, law and centralization. Its literature has a stronger rational spirit and collective consciousness and a solemn and noble temperament, but it also lacks the vivid aura and unrestrained childlike innocence of Greek literature. Ancient Roman literature emphasized balance, preciseness and harmony in art, attached importance to rhetoric and syntax, and tended to be carved and pretentious in technique.
Historical evolution: The development of ancient Roman literature similar to Virgil in 1 century has roughly gone through three stages, namely, * * * * and times, golden age and silver age. It should be pointed out that "* * * and Times" is a political concept, while "Golden Age" and "Silver Age" are two names mainly characterized by the development and problems of Latin language. The era of * * * ended in 30 BC, actually including the golden age of 70 years. In addition, as a political concept, the era of * * * began in 5 10 BC, but as a name related to the development of literature, it began in the previous 240 years. Although the Western Roman Empire, with Rome as its capital, perished in 476 AD, academic circles are usually used to taking the middle of the 2nd century AD (130- 150) as the ending point of ancient Roman literature. Latin literature after the middle of the 2nd century was defined as "post-classical Latin literature", and Latin literature in this period began to transition to medieval Christian literature, which did not belong to ancient Roman literature in the traditional sense.