Age of Trajan

This course explores the social, political, and literary culture of the nineteen-year period of the principate of Trajan through examination of select works of its two primary literary figures, the historian Tacitus and the epistolographer Pliny the Younger, and brief consideration of the literary milieu that included the epigrammatist Martial, the satirist Juvenal, the biographers Suetonius and Plutarch, the orator Dio Chrysostom, and the slave philosopher Epictetus. Readings will focus on the private Letters of Pliny (Books 1-9) and the later books (11-16) of Tacitus’s Annals.