J. Wight Duff's A Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age opens with a sweeping survey of imperial Latin writing from Tiberius to Hadrian, setting the era against the "Golden Age" of Cicero, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. This was a time when Roman power expanded, public life changed under monarchy, and literature absorbed both the grandeur and the anxieties of imperial rule. Duff presents the Silver Age as a vivid, original literary world shaped by rhetoric, education, patronage, censorship...

For five days we had been rolling across the United States in a Pullman car, on our way to the opposite side of the globe. We might have set out from New York across the Atlantic, changing steamships in some European port and going the whole distance by water. But we had decided to see our own country first, and after our long journey across the continent, here we were at last rumbling into the city of Seattle. The Pacific Ocean was spread before us. Perhaps more people sail from San Franc...