against the excessive precision of the previous age. It had become the
practice to pay too much attention to standardized forms of expression, and
to leave too little play to the individual writer. In the healthy reaction
against this formalism, greater freedom of expression now manifests itself.
We note also the introduction of idioms from the colloquial language, along
with many poetical words and usages. The following authors deserve mention:

Phaedrus, flourished about 40 A.D. (Fables in Verse)
Velleius Paterculus, flourished about 30 A.D. (Historian).
Lucan, 39-65 A.D. (Poem on the Civil War).
Seneca, about 1-65 A.D. (Tragedies; Philosophical Works).
Pliny the Elder, 23-79 A.D. ("Natural History").
Pliny the Younger, 62-about 115 A.D. ("Letters").
Martial, about 45-about 104 A.D. (Epigrams).
Quintilian, about 35-about 100 A.D. (Treatise on Oratory and Education).
Tacitus, about 55-about 118 A.D. (Historian).
Juvenal, about 55-about 135 A.D. (Satirist).
Suetonius, about 73-about 118 A.D. ("Lives of the Twelve Caesars").
Minucius Felix, flourished about 160 A.D. (First Christian Apologist).
Apuleius, 125-about 200 A.D. ("Metamorphoses," or "Golden Ass").

e. _The Archaizing Period._ This period is characterized by a conscious
imitation of the Archaic Period of the second and first centuries B.C.; it
overlaps the preceding period, and is of importance from a linguistic
rather than from a literary point of view. Of writers who manifest the
archaizing tendency most conspicuously may be mentioned Fronto, from whose
hand we have a collection of letters addressed to the Emperors Antoninus
Pius and Marcus Aurelius; also Aulus Gellius, author of the "Attic Nights."
Both of these writers flourished in the second half of the second century
A.D.