ary diletantism of educated circles of the day, as also for
the light it throws upon the administrative policies of Trajan. An
embittered critic of the age was the satirist Juvenal (d. about 130
A. D.), from Aquinum in Italy, who wrote from a stoical standpoint but
with little learning and narrow vision. Somewhat later the first literary
history of Rome was written by Suetonius (75-150 A. D.), who is better
known as the author of the _Lives of the Caesars_ (from Julius to
Domitian), a series of gossipy narratives which set the style for future
historical writing in Rome.

With Hadrian begins the period of archaism in Roman literature, that is,
an artificial return to the Latin of Cato, Ennius and Plautus, an
unmistakable symptom of intellectual sterility.

*Provincial literature.* The progress of Romanization in the provinces is
clearly marked by the participation of provincials in the literary life of
Rome. From the Cisalpine, from Narbonese Gaul, and from Spain, men with
literary instincts and ability had been drawn to the capital as the sole
place where their talents would find recognition. But gradually some of
the provinces developed a Latin culture of their own. The first evidences
of this change came from the age of the Antonines, when a Latin literature
made its appearance in the province of Africa. Its earliest representative
was the sophist Apuleius, the author of the romance entitled _The Golden
Ass_.

*Christian literature.* It was in Africa also that a Latin Christian
literature first arose, and it was the African Christian writers who made
Latin the language of the church in Italy and the West. Of these Christian
apologists the earliest and most influential was Tertullian of Carthage,
whose literary activity falls in the time of the Severi. Cyprian and
Arnobius continued his task in the third century. In Minucius Felix, a
contemporary of Tertullian, the Christian community at Rome found an able
defender of the faith.

*Jurisprudence.* In all other sciences the Romans sat at the feet of the
Greeks, but in that of jurisprudence they displayed both independence and
originality. The growth of Roman jurisprudence was not hampered but
furthered by the establishment of the principate, for the development of a
uniform administrative system for the whole empire called for the
corresponding development of a uniform system of law. The study of law was
stimulated by the practice of Augustus and his successors who g