Augustan age
Empire's literary peak
An Augustan age is a period of literary refinement and classical elegance, named for the reign of Roman Emperor Augustus (27 BCE–14 CE), when Virgil, Horace, and Ovid flourished.
In English literature, the term typically refers to the early 18th century—the era of Pope, Swift, and Addison—marked by wit, satire, and neoclassical ideals.
Any culture's golden age of letters may be called Augustan: the Augustan age of French drama.
- VirgilClassical epic poet
- Roman EmpireAncient state from Augustus onward
- HoraceMale name from antiquity
- Latin poetryVerse in Rome's language
- RomeItaly's capital city
Queen Anne · Tatler · polite society · neoclassicism · order · satire · Enlightenment · Jonathan Swift · Gulliver's Travels · civic virtue · harmony · Alexander Pope · mock-heroic · Georgian era · Pax Romana · Ovid · Swift · Age of Reason
- English LiteratureShakespeare, Dickens, Jane Austen, Bronte, Chaucer
- AugustusOctavian, principate, Livia, Tiberius, Julia
- Historical periodsVictorian era, Victorian age, Renaissance, Enlightenment, medieval period
- literary movementsRomanticism, Realism, Modernism, Surrealism, Symbolism
- literary periodsRenaissance, medieval, Victorian, modern, contemporary
- 18th Century EnglishJonathan Swift, lexicography, Alexander Pope, heroic couplet, coffeehouse culture
Augustan ageRomantic period
19th-century artistic movement
Romanticism · Modernism · Gothic period · Beat Generation · Transcendentalism
Augustan ageDark Ages
Post-Roman European decline
fall of Rome · revolutionary period · interregnum · medieval period
Augustan ageprimitivism
Idealization of pre-modern life
avant-garde · experimentalism · folk revival · naive art · outsider art