Cornelius Gallus

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cornelius Gallus (ca. 70 BC–26 BC), Roman poet, orator and politician, was born of humble parents at Forum Julii (Fréjus) in Gaul.

At an early age he moved to Rome, where he was taught by the same master as Virgil and Varius Rufus. Virgil, who dedicated one of his eclogues (X) to him, was in great measure indebted to the influence of Gallus for the restoration of his estate. In political life Gallus espoused the cause of Octavianus, and as a reward for his services was made praefect of Egypt (Suetonius, Augustus, 66). In 29 BC, Cornelius Gallus led a campaign to subdue a revolt in Thebes. He erected a monument in Philae to glorify his accomplishments. Gallus' conduct brought him into disgrace with the emperor, and a new prefectus was named. After his recall, Gallus put an end to his life (Cassius Dio, liii 23).

Gallus enjoyed a high reputation among his contemporaries as a man of intellect, and Ovid (Tristia, IV) considered him the first of the elegiac poets of Rome. He wrote four books of elegies chiefly on his mistress Lycoris (a poetical name for Cytheris, a notorious actress), in which he took for his model Euphorion of Chalcis; he also translated some of this author's works into Latin. He is often thought of as a key figure in the establishment of the genre of Latin love-elegy, and an inspiration for Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid. Almost nothing by him has survived; until recently, one pentameter ("uno tellures diuidit amne duas") was all that had been handed down. Then, in 1978 a papyrus was found at Qasr Ibrim, in Egyptian Nubia, containing nine lines by Gallus, arguably the oldest surviving MS of Latin poetry. The fragments of the four poems attributed to him (first published by Aldus Manutius in 1590 and printed in Alexander Riese's Anthologia Latina, 1869) are generally regarded as a forgery.

Until recently, all that was left of the poet's work was a single quoted pentameter: uno tellures diuidit amne duas, "(the Scythian river) divides the two lands (Europe and Asia) with a single stream". Then, in 1979, a spectacular papyrus find at Qasr Ibrim in Egypt restored to us a set of ten verses from Gallus' work. This papyrus is, together with a fragment of the Carmen de bello Aegyptiaco, the oldest manuscript of Latin poetry to survive from antiquity.^[1]

[edit] References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.