SOURCE: Hadas, Moses. “The Age of Hadrian.” In A History of Latin Literature, pp. 334-52. N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1952.

In the following essay, Hadas surveys Latin literature during the reign of Hadrian.

Hadrian was the first of the Roman emperors to wear a beard, and the neatly trimmed archaism is a sign manifest of the first full-blown classicizing renascence in European literature, which Hadrian introduced. The sculptors of his age produced the pretty copies of Greek classics which fill our museums, and the pretty productions of the littérateurs are their exact counterpart. Silver Latin was enslaved to rhetorical embellishment and point, as we have seen, but the ornate dress was still a dress, calculated to make the most of its wearers' good features. Now it becomes an end in itself, with the idea that the dress might have contents almost obscene. In Greek the so-called Second...