The trademark exuberance of Lucilius, gentleness of Horace, abrasiveness of Persius, and vehemence of Juvenal are the diverse satiric styles on display in this Reader. Witnesses to the spectacular growth of Rome’s political and military power, the expansion and diversification of its society, and the evolution of a wide spectrum of its literary genres, satirists provide an unparalleled window into Roman culture: from trials of the urban poor to the smarmy practices of legacy hunters, from musings on satire and the satirist to gruesome scenes from a gladiatorial contest, from a definition of virtue to the scandalous sexual display of wayward women. Provocative and entertaining, challenging and yet accessible, Roman verse satire is a motley dish stuffed to its readers’ delights.

This selection of Latin readings, drawn from texts in a variety of genres across four centuries, aims to provide a comprehensive and accurate picture of the images and realities of women in Roman antiquity. Depicted in the readings are both historical and fictional women, of varying ages and at different stages of life, from a range of social classes, and from different locales. We see them dramatized—sometimes in their own words—in the roles the women actually played, as wives and mothers, friends and lovers. This Reader differs from others in showing women in explicitly erotic roles, in drawing some of its passages from "archaic" Latin, and in encouraging a variety of critical approaches, all suitable for its intended college-level audience.

This reader aims to introduce advanced Latin students to the works of Sallust, unique among Roman historians for several reasons. Because he uses standard vocabulary and uncomplicated syntax, Sallust is an accessible author at this level. Unlike other Roman historians whose subject matter was a distant past, Sallust writes about events that occurred in his lifetime. His roller-coaster career afforded him a unique opportunity to critique the inner mechanisms of contemporary Roman politics from the vantage of an outsider.

Innovator in the literature of philosophical advising and reshaper of myth in tragedy, at turns inspiring and disturbing: This is Seneca the Younger. A mosaic of readings from four main genres with select follow-up passages showcases Seneca as therapeutic consoler, mirror to the prince, tragedian of the passions, and moral epistolographer—a thinker whose literary voice sounds against the volatility of his times. Seneca spins the republican Cicero's stylistic legacy and Augustan literature's gold into the distinctive silver of the first century CE: concise in encapsulating ideas, inventive in borrowing the vocabulary of everyday life, and with a propensity for using vivid images to depict emotional experience. This is a style the historian Tacitus deemed "œfitted to the ears of his age."

The popular appeal of Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars is obvious. Who would not thrill reading about the great Julius Caesar's delight in the Senate's bestowal of the right to wear a laurel wreath on all occasions—because it covered his baldness? Or that the Divine Augustus had rotten teeth and wore special platform shoes to make himself look taller?