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Chapter 5 - To Educate and to Entertain: Didactic and the Arrangement of Knowledge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2024

Laurel Fulkerson  and
Jeffrey Tatum
Laurel Fulkerson
Affiliation:
Florida State University
Jeffrey Tatum
Affiliation:
Victoria University of Wellington
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Summary

The fifth chapter covers the broad span of prose and poetic Latin literature that intends to instruct. But didactic works are never simply technical: even those that seem clunky to us were written with an eye to style, at least in parts. On the other hand, some of those that seem purely ornamental have in fact been found genuinely useful by some readers. We discuss the genre’s origins in Greek literature, and explore primary prose and poetic exemplars: Cato, Varro, Cicero, Lucretius, Vergil and Ovid.

Keywords

HesiodAratusOvidLucretiusVergilVitruviusVarroCato the Elderdidactic literatureCicero
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Chapter
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A History of Latin Literature From its Beginnings to the Age of Augustus , pp. 148 - 197
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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