Comedy's mirror.--Ancient Rome reflected in Plautus and Terence.--The comic spirit in Plautus and Terence.-- Cicero's Rome: the republic.--Cicero himself.--Caesar and Cicero.--Catullus.--Horace.--The Rome of Augustus as Horace saw it.--The Roman way.--Enter the romantic Roman; Virgil, Livy, Seneca.--Juvenal's Rome and the Stoics.-- The end of antiquity.--Chronology