1st century
Showing 357 works across all media from the 1st century
Metamorphoses
Ovid runs classical myth through a single idea, transformation, from the creation of the world to Julius Caesar. Girls become trees and hunters become deer, and painters have ransacked him for centuries.
Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans
Plutarch pairs each famous Greek with a Roman, Alexander with Caesar, and judges them, holding that a jest can reveal a man better than a battle. Shakespeare took three plays out of it.
Letters from a Stoic
Nero's tutor sets down how to die, how to hold wealth lightly, and how to stop waiting for life to begin. Philosophy arrives as advice from someone who likes you.
The Satires
Bread and circuses came from here, and so did the line about guarding the guards. Juvenal turns sixteen poems of fury on imperial Rome, where an honest man cannot afford to live.
Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing.