The first century BC Roman world produced an extraordinary concentration of intellectual talent: Cicero, Caesar, Lucretius, Catullus, Varro, and Sallust were all contemporaries, writing within a few decades of each other in the same city while that city tore itself apart in civil wars.

The literary output is remarkable for its self-consciousness: these writers knew they were working in a tradition defined by Greek models, were explicitly theorizing Latin as a literary language capable of matching Greek achievement, and were doing all of this while their political world collapsed around them. Cicero's philosophical works, written in a burst of productivity after his daughter's death and his political marginalization, are grief literature as much as philosophy.

Lucretius' De Rerum Natura — a philosophical poem arguing for Epicurean materialism in hexameters — is the most ambitious undertaking in Latin letters and one of the strangest: an extended argument that the universe operates without divine intervention, that the soul dies with the body, and that death is not to be feared, written in a tradition of epic poetry that celebrated divine intervention and heroic glory.

Catullus' love poems are the most personal surviving poetry from the ancient world. The relationship with 'Lesbia' (identified with Clodia Metelli, a woman from one of Rome's most prominent families) is documented across 25 poems that move from infatuation through betrayal to bitter grief. That this is literature rather than documentary is obvious; that it reflects genuine emotional experience seems equally obvious.