Rome

Certain · the city

Founded, her poets said, from Aeneas’s Trojan remnant; conqueror of the Greek world and conquered by its culture — “captive Greece took captive her rough captor.” In this library Rome speaks in Virgil’s epic, Cicero’s and Seneca’s philosophy, Marcus Aurelius writing Greek meditations in an army camp, Livy’s history, and Plotinus teaching the last great pagan philosophy to Roman senators under Gallienus.