The golden age of Latin literature is a period consisting roughly of the time from approxiately 75 BC to 14 AD, covering the end of the Roman Republic and the reign of Augustus Caesar. Classical Latinists believe that this period represents the peak of quality of Latin literature, and that its Latin usage represents the best norm that other writers should follow.

Grammatical differences between early Latin and Golden Age Latin

Classical Latin basically had changed the very early -om and -os endings to -um and -us.

Some lexical differences to later Latin include the broadening of meaning later on (eg. forte meant not only 'surprisingly' but also 'hard').

The Classical Golden Authors

Poetry

The earliest poet considered to be Golden Age Latin is the Epicurean philosopher Lucretius, who wrote a long didactic poem On the Nature of Things in which Epicurean philosophy is expounded.

Catullus was a slightly later, but more important poet. Catullus pioneered the naturalization of Greek lyric verse forms in Latin. The poetry of Catullus was personal, sometimes erotic, sometimes playful, and frequently abusive. He wrote exclusively in Greek metres. The heavy hand of Greek prosody would continue to have a pronounced influence on the style and syntax of Latin poetry until the rise of Christianity made a different sort of hymnody become needed.

The Grecianizing tendencies of Golden Age Latin reached their apex in Vergil, whose Æneid was an epic poem after the method of Homer; in Horace, whose odes and satires were after the manner of the Greek anthology, and who used almost all of the fixed forms of Greek prosody in Latin; and in Ovid, who wrote long and learned poems on mythological subjects, as well as semi-satirical pieces such as the Ars Amatoria, the Art of Love . Tibullus and Propertius also wrote poems that were modelled after Greek antecedents.

Prose

In prose, Golden Age Latin is exemplified by Julius Caesar, whose Commentaries on the Gallic Wars display a laconic, precise, military style; and by Marcus Tullius Cicero, a practicing lawyer and politician, whose judicial arguments and political speeches, most notably the Catiline Orations, were considered for centuries to be the best models for Latin prose. Cicero also wrote many letters which have come down to us, and a few philosophical tracts in which he gives his version of Stoicism.

Historiography was an important genre of classical Latin prose; it includes Sallust, who wrote of the Conspiracy of Catiline and the War Against Jugurtha, his only works that have been preserved complete. Livy, also, was a historian; his Ab Urbe Condita, a history of Rome "from the Founding of the City," was originally in 145 books, of which only 35 have been preserved.