Latin literature includes the essays, histories, poems, plays, and other writings written in the Latin language. The beginning of formal Latin literature dates to 240 BC, when the first stage play in Latin was performed in Rome. Latin literature flourished for the next six centuries. The classical era of Latin literature can be roughly divided into several periods: Early Latin literature, The Golden Age, The Imperial Period and Late Antiquity.
Cato the Elder
Cicero
Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English, was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He composed three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid. A number of minor poems, collected in the Appendix Vergiliana, were attributed to him in ancient times, but modern scholars consider his authorship of these poems to be dubious.
Modern bust of Virgil at the entrance to his crypt in Naples
Page from the beginning of the Eclogues in the 5th-century Vergilius Romanus
Horace, Virgil and Varius at the house of Maecenas, by Charles Jalabert.
Late 17th-century illustration of a passage from the Georgics, by Jerzy Siemiginowski-Eleuter.