oratio certam regulam non habet; consuetudo illam ciuitatis, quae numquam in eodem diu stetit, uersat.
Style has no fixed rules; the usage of society changes it, which never stays still for long.
Seneca Epistle 114.13
This is the first of two volumes of critical essays on Latin literature of the imperial period from Ovid to late antiquity. The focus is upon the main postclassical period (A.D. 1-150), especially the authors of the Neronian and Flavian principates (A.D. 54-96), several of whom, though recently the subject of substantial investigation and reassessment, remain largely unread, at best improperly understood. The change which took place in Roman literature between the late republic/early Augustan period and the post-Augustan empire, between the ‘classicism’ of Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Livy and the ‘postclassicism’ of Seneca, Lucan, Persius, Tacitus is conventionally misdescribed (albeit sometimes with qualifications) as the movement from Golden to Silver Latin. The description misleads on many counts, not least because it misconstrues a change in literary and poetic sensibility, in the mental sets of reader and audience, and in the political environment of writing itself, as a change in literary value. What in fact happened awaits adequate description, but it seems clear that the change began with Ovid (43 B.C. to A.D. 17), whose rejection of Augustan classicism (especially its concept of decorum or ‘appropriateness’), cultivation of generic disorder and experimentation (witness, e.g., Ars Amatoria and Metamorphoses), love of paradox, absurdity, incongruity, hyperbole, wit, and focus on extreme emotional states, influenced everything that followed. Ovid also witnessed and suffered from the increasing political repression of the principate; he was banished for — among other things — his words, carmen. And political repression seems to have been a signal factor, if difficult to evaluate, in the formation of the postclassical style.