In this now-classic history of Roman civilization, Edith Hamilton vividly depicts Roman life and spirit as they are revealed by the greatest writers of the age. Among these literary guides are Cicero, who left an incomparable collection of letters; Catullus, who was the quintessential poet of love; Horace, who chronicled a cruel and materialistic Rome; and the Romantics: Virgil, Livy, and Seneca. Hamilton concludes her work by contrasting the high-mindedness of Stoicism with the collapse of values as witnessed by the historian Tacitus and the satirist Juvenal.