Quintus Ennius (239 - 169 BC) was a writer during the period of the Roman Republic, and is often considered the father of Roman poetry.

Although only fragments of his works survive, his influence in Latin literature was significant.

Ennius' more famous works include: the Epicharmus, the Euhemerus, the Hedyphagetica, Saturae, and the Annals (Annales in Latin).

The Epicharmus presented an account of the gods and the physical operations of the universe. In it, the poet dreamed he had been transported after death to some place of heavenly enlightenment.

The Euhemerus presented a theological doctrine of a vastly different type in a mock-simple prose stylemodelled on the Greek of Euhemerus of Messene and several other theological writers. According to this doctrine, the gods of Olympus were not supernatural powers still actively intervening in the affairs of men, but great generals, statesmen and inventors of olden times commemorated after death in extraordinary ways.

The Hedyphagetica took much of its substance from the gastronomical epic of Archestratus of Gela, a work commonly associated with Epicureanism. The eleven extant hexameters have prosodical features avoided in the more serious Annales.

The remains of six books of Saturae show a considerable variety of metres. There are signs that Ennius varied the metre sometimes even within a composition. A frequent theme was the social life of Ennius himself and his upper-class Roman friends and their intellectual conversation.

The Annals was an epic poem in eighteen books covering Roman history from the fall of Troy in 1184 BC down to the censorship of Cato the Elder in 184 BC. It was the first Latin poem to adopt the dactylic hexameter metre used in Greek epic and didactic, leading it to become the standard metre for these genres in Latin poetry. The Annals became a school text for Roman schoolchildren, eventually supplanted by Virgil's Aeneid. About 600 lines survive.

R. A. Brooks, Ennius and Roman Tragedy (1981)

Publius Ovidius Naso (Sulmona, March 20, 43 BC ­ Tomis, now Constanta AD 17) Roman poet known to the English-speaking world as Ovid, wrote on topics of love, abandoned women, and mythological transformations. Ranked alongside Virgil and Horace as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature, Ovid was generally considered the greatest master of the elegiac couplet. His poetry, largely imitated during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, had a decisive influence on European art and literature for centuries.

Ovid wrote in elegiac couplets, with two exceptions: his lost Medea, whose two fragments are in iambic trimeter and anapests, respectively, and his great Metamorphoses, which he wrote in dactylic hexameter, the meter of Virgil's Aeneid and Homer's epics. Ovid offers an epic unlike those of his predecessors, a chronological account of the cosmos from creation to his own day, incorporating many myths and legends about supernatural transformations from the Greek and Roman traditions.

Augustus banished Ovid in AD 8 to Tomis on the Black Sea for reasons that remain mysterious. Ovid himself wrote that it was because of an error and a carmen ­ a mistake and a poem (Tr. 2.207). The error itself is uncertain. Ovid may have had an affair with a female relative of Augustus, or withheld knowledge of such an affair. The carmen, however, is probably his Ars Amatoria, a didactic poem offering amatory advice to Roman men and women, which had been in circulation for several years.

It was during this period of exile -- more properly known as a relegation -- that Ovid wrote two more collections of poems, called Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, which illustrate his sadness and desolation away from Rome. Even though he was friendly with the natives of Tomis, he still pined for Rome and his beloved third wife. Many of the poems are addressed to her, but also to Augustus, whom he calls Caesar and sometimes God, to himself, and even sometimes to the poems themselves, which expresses his heart-felt solitude. The famous first two lines of the Tristia demonstrate the poet's misery from the start.

Ovid died at Tomis after nearly ten years of banishment.

Works of Ovid

September 23, 2000 - The London Times

The long-lost villa of Ovid has been discovered on the banks of the Tiber, together with what may be a portrait of the Roman poet not seen for 2,000 years.

The villa, which dates to between the 1st century BC and the 1st century AD, had been found by workmen clearing an area of small workshops to make way for a new council offices. They found the villa walls 15ft down, and a mosaic covered in clay that was in "mint condition".

Professor Messineo said that he had "no doubt" that the villa was the one described by Ovid in his letters. "The poet says he can see people streaming across the Milvian Bridge , and then dividing to go along the Via Flaminia, which ran along the river - and still does - or up the Via Cassia, which heads north at right angles to it. This is exactly what we see from this spot today." The old Milvian Bridge - where the Emperor Constantine won a momentous victory in AD312, paving the way for the conversion of Rome to Christianity - is still used by pedestrians.

Raffaella Tione, the archeologist in charge of the dig, said that additional evidence associating the villa with Ovid was provided by a five-metre-square mosaic of black and white geometric patterns forming the floor of what was once a porticoed riverside open-air summer dining room.

In the middle of the mosaic is a color picture of middle-aged man with a white-flecked beard wearing a crown of laurel leaves and carrying a flowering staff with bows tied to it. He appears to have a slight squint. Signora Tione said the picture faced the benches where Ovid's guests would have sat eating and drinking. "It could be Dionysus, the god of fertility and drunken revels, or a follower such as Silenus," she said. "It could be an ideal poet, perhaps Greek. But we prefer to think it is Ovid."

At the height of his fame Ovid was exiled by Augustus to the Black Sea, and was never allowed to return to his beloved villa. Ovid says he fell foul of the Emperor not only because of his irreverent poetry but also because of an unnamed "error". Some scholars believe this refers to Ovid's adulterous affairs, which may have included a liaison with Livia, the Emperor's wife.

Signora Tione said her team had discovered five further rooms originally decorated with colored plaster and columns, as well as a grotto. Much of the villa now lies under blocks of flats. Professor Messineo said the mosaic would be incorporated into the new council offices. Visitors would view it from a walkway.

Marcus Annaeus Lucanus (November 3, AD 39-April 30, 65), better known in English as Lucan, was a Roman poet, and is one of the outstanding figures of the Silver Latin period.He found success under Nero, and won a prize for poetry in 60. His epic poem, Pharsalia (but labelled Bellum civile in the manuscripts), which told the story of the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey, was much acclaimed. However, he soon fell out of favor, and was lured into the conspiracy of Gaius Calpurnius Piso. His treason having been discovered, he was obliged to commit suicide by opening a vein, but not before incriminating his mother (among others) in hopes of a pardon.

His father was involved in the proscription, his mother escaped, and his widow Polla Argentaria survived to receive the homage of Statius under Domitian. The birthday of Lucan was kept as a festival after his death, and a poem addressed to his widow upon one of these occasions and containing information on the poet's work and career is still extant (Statius's Silvae, ii.7, entitled Genethliacon Lucani).

As with Virgil's masterpiece, Lucan's epic poem was unfinished at the time of his death, and its untidy condition is reflected in its 400 complete and partial copies. As A.E. Housman stated in the preface to his edition of 1926, "the manuscripts group themselves not in families but in factions; their dissidences and agreements are temporary and transient ... and the true line of division is between the variants themselves, not between the manuscripts which offer them."

Pharsalia was celebrated during the Middle Ages; Dante in De vulgari eloquentia mentions Lucan, along with Ovid, Virgil and Statius as one of the four regulati poetae (ii, vi, 7). In Inferno Dante ranks him side by side with Homer, Horace, Ovid and Virgil (Inferno, IV,88).

His work had tremendous influence in the poetry and drama of the 17th century. Shelley, Southey and Macaulay all praised his work.

Silius Italicus, in full Titus Catius Silius Italicus (AD 25 or 26 - 101), was a Latin epic poet.

His birthplace is unknown. From his cognomen Italicus the conclusion has been drawn that he came from the town of Italica in Spain; but Latin usage would in that case have demanded the form Italicensis, and it is highly improbable that Martial would have failed to name him among the literary celebrities of Spain in the latter half of the 1st century.

The conjecture that Silius derived from Italica, the capital of the Italian confederation during the Social War, is open to still stronger objection. Most likely some ancestor of the poet acquired the title Italicus from having been a member of one of the corporations of Italici who are often mentioned in inscriptions from Sicily and elsewhere.In early life Silius was a renowned forensic orator, later a safe and cautious politician, without ability or ambition enough to be legitimately obnoxious to the cruel rulers under whom he lived.

But mediocrity was hardly an efficient protection against the murderous whims of Nero, and Silius was generally believed to have secured at once his own safety and his promotion to the consulship by prostituting his oratorical powers in the judicial farces which often ushered in the doom of the emperor's victims.

He was consul in the year of Nero's death (68), and is mentioned by Tacitus as having been one of two witnesses who were present at the conferences between Vitellius and Flavius Sabinus, the elder brother of Vespasian, when the legions from the East were marching rapidly on the capital.

The life of Silius after his consulship is well depicted by the younger Pliny: He conducted himself wisely and courteously as the friend of the luxurious and cruel Vitellius; he won repute by his proconsulship of Asia, and obliterated by the praiseworthy use he made of his leisure the stain he had incurred through his active exertions in former days.

In dignity and contentment, avoiding power and therefore hostility, he outlived the Flavian dynasty, keeping to a private station after his governorship of Asia.His poem contains only two passages relating to the Flavians; in both Domitian is eulogized as a warrior; in one he figures as a singer whose lyre is sweeter than that of Orpheus himself.

Silius was a great student and patron of literature and art, and a passionate collector. Two great Romans of the past, Cicero and Virgil, were by him idealized and veritably worshipped; and he was the happy possessor of their estates at Tusculum and Naples.

The later life of Silius was passed on the Campanian shore, hard by the tomb of Virgil, at which he offered the homage of a devotee.He closely emulated the lives of his two great heroes: the one he followed in composing epic verse, the other in debating philosophic questions with his friends of like tastes.

Among these was Epictetus, who judged him to be the most philosophic spirit among the Romans of his time, and Cornutus, the Stoic, rhetorician and grammarian, who appropriately dedicated to Silius a commentary upon Virgil.Though the verse of Silius is not wrapped in Stoic gloom like that of Lucan, yet Stoicism lends in many places a not ungraceful gravity to his poem.

Silius was one of the numerous Romans of the early empire who had the courage of their opinions, and carried into perfect practice the theory of suicide adopted by their school. Stricken by an incurable tumour, he starved himself to death, keeping a cheerful countenance to the end.Whether Silius committed to writing his philosophic dialogues or not, we cannot say.

Chance has preserved to us his epic poem entitled Punica, in seventeen books, and comprising some fourteen thousand lines. In choosing the Second Punic War for his subject, Silius had, we know, many predecessors, as he doubtless had many followers. From the time of Naevius onwards every great military struggle in which the Romans had been engaged bad found its poet over and over again.

In justice to Silius and Lucan, it should be observed that the mythologic poet had a far easier task than the historic.

In a well-known passage Petronius pointedly describes the difficulties of the historic theme. A poet, he said, who should take upon him the vast subject of the civil wars would break down beneath the burden unless he were full of learning, since he would have not merely to record facts, which the historians did much better, but must possess an unshackled genius, to which full course must be given. by the use of digressions, by bringing divine beings on to the stage, and by giving generally a mythologic tinge to the subject.

The Latin laws of the historic epic were fixed by Ennius, and were still binding when Claudian wrote. They were never seriously infringed, except by Lucan, who substituted for the dei ex machina of his predecessors the vast, dim and imposing Stoic conception of destiny.

By protracted application, and being full of learning, Silius had acquired excellent recipes for every ingredient that went to the making of the conventional historic epic. Though he is not named by Quintilian, he is probably hinted at in the mention of a class of poets who, as the writer says, write to show their learning.

To seize the moments in the history, however unimportant, which were capable of picturesque treatment; to pass over all events, however important, which could not readily be rendered into heroics; to stuff out the somewhat modern heroes to something like Homeric proportions; to subject all their movements to the passions and caprices of the Olympians; to ransack the poetry of the past for incidents and similes on which a slightly new face might be put; to foist in by well-worn artifices episodes, however strange to the subject, taken from the mythologic or historic glories of Rome and Greece, all this Silius knew how to do.

He did it all with the languid grace of the inveterate connoisseur, and with a simplicity foreign to his time, which sprang in part from cultivated taste and horror of the venturesome word, and in part from the subdued tone of a life which had come unscathed through the reigns of Caligula, Nero and Domitian.The more threadbare the theme, and the more worn the machinery, the greater the need of genius. Two of the most rigid requirements of the ancient epic were abundant similes and abundant single combats.

But all the obvious resemblances between the actions of heroic man and external nature had long been worked out, while for the renovation of the single combat little could be done till the hero of the Homeric type was replaced by the medieval knight. Silius, however, had perfect poetic appreciation, with scarce a trace of poetic creativeness. No writer has ever been more correctly and more uniformly judged by contemporaries and by posterity alike. Only the shameless flatterer, Martial, ventured to call his friend a poet as great as Virgil.

But the younger Pliny gently says that he wrote poems with greater diligence than talent, and that, when, according to the fashion of the time, he recited them to his friends, he sometimes found out what men really thought of them. It is indeed strange that the poem lived on. Silius is never mentioned by ancient writers after Pliny except Sidonius, who, under different conditions and at a much lower level, was such another as he.

Since the discovery of Silius by Poggio, no modern enthusiast has arisen to sing his praises. His poem has been rarely edited since the 18th century. Yet, by the purity of his taste and his Latin in an age when taste was fast becoming vicious and Latin corrupt, by his presentation to us of a type of a thousand vanished Latin epics, and by the historic aspects of his subject, Silius merits better treatment from scholars than he has received. The general reader he can hardly interest again.

He is indeed of imitation all compact, and usually dilutes what he borrows; he may add a new beauty, but new strength he never gives. Hardly a dozen lines anywhere are without an echo of Virgil, and there are frequent admixtures of Lucretius, Horace, Ovid, Lucan, Homer, Hesiod and many other poets still extant. If we could reconstitute the library of Silius we should probably find that scarcely an idea or a phrase in his entire work was wholly his own.

The raw material of the Punica was supplied in the main by the third decade of Livy, though Silius may have consulted other historians of the Hannibalic war. Such facts as are used are generally presented with their actual circumstances unchanged, and in their historic sequence. The spirit of the Punic times is but rarely misconceived--as when to secret voting is attributed the election of men like Gaius Flaminius and Gaius Terentius Varro, and distinguished Romans are depicted as contending in a gladiatorial exhibition. Silius clearly intended the poem to consist of twenty-four books, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, but after the twelfth he hurries in visible weariness to the end, and concludes with seventeen.

The general plan of the epic follows that of the Iliad and the Aeneid. Its theme is conceived as a duel between two mighty nations, with parallel dissensions among the gods. Scipio Africanus and Hannibal are the two great heroes who take the place of Achilles and Hector on the one hand and of Aeneas and Turnus on the other, while the minor figures are all painted with Virgilian or Homeric pigments.

In the delineation of character our poet is neither very powerful nor very consistent. His imagination was too weak to realize the actors with distinctness and individuality. His Hannibal is evidently at the outset meant for an incarnation of cruelty and treachery, the embodiment of all that the vulgar Roman attached to the name Punic.

But in the course of the poem the greatness of Hannibal is borne in upon the poet, and his feeling of it betrays itself in many touches. Thus he names Scipio the great Hannibal of Ausonia; he makes Juno assure the Carthaginian leader that if fortune had only permitted him to be born a Roman he would have been admitted to a place among the gods; and, when the ungenerous monster of the first book accords in the fifteenth a splendid burial to Marcellus, the poet cries, You would fancy it was a Sidonian chief who had fallen.

Silius deserves little pity for the failure of his attempt to make Scipio an equipoise to Hannibal and the counterpart in personal prowess and prestige of Achilles. He becomes in the process almost as mythical a figure as the medieval Alexander.

The best drawn of the minor characters are Fabius Cunctator, an evident copy of Lucan's Cato, and Paullus, the consul killed at Cannae, who fights, hates and dies like a genuine man.Clearly it was a matter of religion with Silius to repeat and adapt all the striking episodes of Homer and Virgil.

Hannibal must have a shield of marvellous workmanship like Achilles and Aeneas; because Aeneas descended into Hades and had a vision of the future history of Rome, so must Scipio have his revelation from heaven; Trebia, choked with bodies, must rise in ire like Xanthus, and be put to flight by Vulcan; for Virgil's Camilla there must be an Asbyte, heroine of Saguntum; the beautiful speech of Euryalus when Nisus seeks to leave him is too good to be thrown away--furbished up a little, it will serve as a parting address from Imilce to her husband Hannibal.

The descriptions of the numerous battles are made up in the main, according to epic rule, of single combats--wearisome sometimes in Homer, wearisome oftener in Virgil, painfully wearisome in Silius. The different component parts of the poem are on the whole fairly well knit together, and the transitions are not often needlessly abrupt; yet occasionally incidents and episodes are introduced with all the irrelevancy of the modern novel.

The interposition of the gods is, however, usually managed with dignity and appropriateness.As to diction and detail, we miss, in general, power rather than taste. The metre runs on with correct smooth monotony, with something always of the Virgilian sweetness, though attenuated, but nothing of the Virgilian variety and strength.

The dead level of literary execution is seldom broken by a rise into the region of genuine pathos and beauty, or by a descent into the ludicrous or the repellent. There are few absurdities, but the restraining force is trained perception and not a native sense of humour, which, ever present in Homer, not entirely absent in Virgil, and sometimes finding grim expression in Lucan, fails Silius entirely.

The address of Anna, Dido's sister, to Juno compels a smile. Though deified on her sister's death, and for a good many centuries already an inhabitant of heaven, Anna meets Juno for the first time on the outbreak of the Second Punic War, and deprecates the anger of the queen of heaven for having deserted the Carthaginians and attached herself to the Roman cause.

Hannibal's parting address to his child is also comical: he recognizes in the heavy wailing of the year-old babe the seeds of rages like his own. But Silius might have been forgiven. for a thousand more weaknesses than he has if in but a few things he had shown. strength.

The grandest scenes in the history before him fail to lift him up; his treatment, for example, of Hannibal's Alpine passage falls immensely below Lucan's vigorous delineation of Cato's far less stirring march across the African deserts.

But in the very weaknesses of Silius we may discern merit. He at least does not try to conceal defects of substance by contorted rhetorical conceits and feebly forcible exaggerations. In his ideal of what Latin expression should be he comes near to his contemporary Quintilian, and resolutely holds aloof from the tenor of his age.

Perhaps his want of success with the men of his time was not wholly due to his faults. His self-control rarely fails him; it stands the test of the horrors of war, and of Venus working her will on Hannibal at Capua. Only a few passages here and there betray the true silver Latin extravagance. In the avoidance of rhetorical artifice and epigrammatic antithesis Silius stands in marked contrast to Lucan, yet at times he can write with point. Regarded merely as a poet he may not deserve high praise; but, as he is a unique specimen and probably the best of a once numerous class, the preservation of his poem among the remains of Latin Literature is a fortunate accident.

The poem was discovered in a manuscript, possibly at Constance, by Poggio, in 1416 or 1417; from this now lost manuscript all existing manuscripts, which belong entirely to the 15th century, are derived. A valuable manuscript of the 8th or 9th century, found at Cologne by L Carrion in the latter part of the 16th century, disappeared soon after its discovery.

Two editiones principes appeared at Rome in 1471; the principal editions since have been those of Heinsius (1600), Drakenborch (1717), Ernesti (Leipzig, 1791) and L Bauer (1890). The Punica is included in the second edition of the Corpus poetarum Latinorum. A useful variorum edition is that of Lemaître (Paris, 1823). Recent writing on Silius is generally in the form of separate articles or small pamphlets.

Wikipedia

Sappho (Attic Greek Sapphu, Aeolic Greek - Psappha) was an Ancient Greek lyric poet from the city of Eressos on the island of Lesbos, which was a cultural centre in the 7th century BC. She was born sometime between 630 BC and 612 BC. The bulk of her poetry is now lost, but her reputation in her time was immense, and she was reputedly considered by Plato as the tenth Muse.

Sappho, daughter of Scamander and Cleis, was married (Attic comedy says to a wealthy merchant, but that is apocryphal) and had a daughter also named Cleïs. She became very famous in her day for her poetry - so much so that the city of Syracuse built a statue to honor her when she visited. Her family was politically active, which caused Sappho to travel a great deal. She was also noted during her life as the headmistress of a sort of Greek finishing school for girls. Most likely the objects of her poetry were her students.

Sappho had three brothers, married and had at least one daughter, was exiled to Syracuse for political reasons, returned in 581 BC, and died in old age.She was one of the canonical nine lyric poets of archaic Greece. Older critics sometimes alleged that she led an aesthetic movement away from typical themes of gods, to the themes of individual human experiences and emotions, but it is now considered more likely that her work belongs in a long tradition of Lesbian poetry, and is simply among the first to have been recorded in writing.

Some of her love poems were addressed to women. The word lesbian itself is derived from the name of the island of Lesbos from which she came. (Her name is also the origin of its much rarer synonym sapphic).

Because of its eroticism and of the difficulties posed by its dialect, her work was not included in the Byzantine school curriculum. The manuscript tradition therefore broke off, but copies of her work have been discovered in Egyptian papyri of an earlier period.

In ancient and medieval times she was famous for (according to legend) throwing herself off a cliff due to unrequited love for a male sailor named Phaon. This legend dates to Ovid and Lucian in Ancient Rome and certainly is not a Christian overlay.

The 3rd Century philosopher Maximus of Tyre wrote that Sappho was "small and dark" and that her relationships to her female friends were similar to those of Socrates:

What else was the love of the Lesbian woman except Socrates' art of love? For they seem to me to have practiced love each in their own way, she that of women, he that of men. For they say that both loved many and were captivated by all things beautiful. What Alcibiades and Charmides and Phaedrus were to him, Gyrinna and Atthis and Anactoria were to the Lesbian.

A major new literary discovery, the Milan Papyrus,[2] recovered from a dismantled mummy casing and published in 2001, has revealed the high esteem in which the poet Posidippus of Pella, an important composer of epigrams (3rd century BC), held Sappho's 'divine songs'. An English translation of the new epigrams, with notes, is available [3], as is the original Greek text.

Aelianus Claudius wrote in Assorted History that Plato called Sappho wise.

Horace wriote in his Odes that Sappho's lyrics are worthy of sacred admiration.

One of Sappho's poems was famously translated by the 1st century BC Roman poet Catullus in his "Ille mi par esse deo videtur" (Catullus 51).

References and Links

Sulpicia I

The earlier Sulpicia is the only known woman from Ancient Rome whose poetry survives to this day. She lived in the reign of Augustus, and was probably the daughter of Servius Sulpicius Rufus and a niece of Messalla, a politician and patron of literature. Her verses were preserved with those of Tibullus, and were for a long time attributed to him. They consist of six elegiac poems addressed to a lover called Cerinthus. Cerinthus was most likely a pseudonym, if not purely fictional; in the same style as Ovid's Corinna or Catullus' Lesbia. Cerinthus was for a long time thought to refer to the Cornutus addressed by Tibullus in two of his Elegies.

For a long time many academics regarded Sulpicia as an amateur author, notable for nothing but her gender. Recently her work has come to be seen more as genuine literature, especially since the 1970s.

Sulpicia II

The later Sulpicia lived during the reign of Domitian. She is praised by Martial (x. 35, 38), who compares her to Sappho, as a model of wifely devotion, and wrote a volume of poems, describing with considerable freedom of language the methods adopted to retain her husband Calenus's affection. An extant poem (70 hexameters) also bears her name. It is in the form of a dialogue between Sulpicia and the muse Calliope, and is chiefly a protest against the banishment of the philosophers by the edict of Domitian (AD 94), as likely to throw Rome back into a state of barbarism.

At the same time Sulpicia expresses the hope that no harm will befall Calenus. The muse reassures her, and prophesies the downfall of the tyrant. It is now generally agreed that the poem (the manuscript of which was discovered in the monastery of Bobbio in 1493, but has long been lost) is not by Sulpicia, but is of much later date, probably the 5th century; according to some it is a 15th century production, and not identical with the Bobbio poem.

Nossis of Locri in Southern Italy, lived around 300 B.C. Twelve of her epigrams survive.She indicates, in her epigrams, that she followed Sappho and wrote love poetry. Meleager substantiates this claim when he refers to her as a "sweet-scented iris of Nossis that he wove into his 'garland.'

Her epigrams show aspects of a womanly world. One poem is a dedication of a cloak at the temple of Hera to the north of her homeland of Locri, in which Nossis mentions her mother and grandmother. Another poem is a dedication from an hetaera to Aphrodite. Three other epigrams describe portraits of women. Another poem is about Artemis assisting in childbirth.

Two other poems deal with men. One is an epitaph for a writer of phylax, a type of burlesque drama. The other honors dead Locrian fighters.

Publius Papinius Statius, (c. AD 45-96) was a Roman poet of the Silver Age of Latin literature, born in Naples, Italy. Besides his poetry, he is best known for his appearance as a major character in the Purgatory section of Dante Alighieri epic poem The Divine Comedy.

He was born to a family of Graeco-Campanian origin, impoverished, but not without political distinctions. The poet's father taught with marked success at Naples and Rome, and from boyhood to age he proved himself a champion in the poetic tournaments which formed an important part of the amusements of the early empire.

The younger Statius declares that his father was in his time equal to any literary task, whether in prose or verse. He mentioned Mevania, and may have spent time there, or been impressed by the confrontation of Vitellius and Vespasian in 69.

Probably, the poet inherited a modest competence and was not under the necessity of begging his bread from wealthy patrons. He certainly wrote poems to order (as Silvae, i.1, 2, ii.7, and iii.4), but there is no indication that the material return for them was important to him, in spite of an allusion in Juvenal's seventh satire.

Little is known of the events in his life. From his boyhood he was victorious in poetic contests many times at his native Naples, thrice at Alba, where he received the golden crown from the hand of the emperor Domitian.

At the great Capitoline competition, probably on its third celebration in 94 AD, Statius failed to win the coveted chaplet of oak leaves. No doubt the extraordinary popularity of his Thebais had led him to regard himself as the supreme poet of the age, and when he could not sustain this reputation in the face of rivals from all parts of the empire he accepted the judges' verdict as a sign that his day was past, and retired to Naples, the home of his ancestors and of his own young years. We still possess the poem he addressed to his wife on this occasion (Silv. iii.5).

There are hints in this poem which naturally lead to the surmise that Statius was suffering from a loss of the emperor's favor. In the preface to book iv. of the Silvae there is mention of detractors who hated his style, and these may have succeeded in inducing a new fashion in poetry at court. Such an eclipse, if it happened, must have cut Statius to the heart.

He appears to have relished thoroughly the role of court-poet. Statius lauds the emperor, not to discharge a debt, but to create an obligation. His flattery is as far removed from the gentle propitiatory tone of Quintilian as it is from the coarse and crawling humiliation of Martial.

It is in the large extravagant style of a nature in itself healthy and generous, which has accepted the theme and left scruples behind.In one of his prefatory epistles Statius declares that he never allowed any work of his to go forth without invoking the godhead of the divine emperor.

Statius had taken the full measure of Domitian's gross taste, and, presenting him with the rodomontade which he loved, puts conscience and sincerity out of view, lest some uneasy twinge should mar his master's enjoyment. But in one poem, that in which the poet pays his due for an invitation to the Imperial table, we have sincerity enough. Statius clearly feels all the raptures he expresses.

He longs for the power of him who told the tale of Dido's banquet, and for the voice of him who sang the, feast of Alcinous, that he may give forth utterance worthy of the lofty theme. The poet seemed, he says, to dine with great Jove himself and to receive nectar from Ganymede the cupbearer (an odious reference to the imperial favourite Eurinus).

All his life hitherto has been barren and profitless. Now only has he begun to live in truth. The palace struck on the poet's fancy like the very hall of heaven; nay, Jove himself marvels at its beauty, but is glad that the emperor should possess such an earthly habitation; he will thus feel less desire to seek his destined abode among the immortals in the skies.

Yet even so gorgeous a palace is all too mean for his greatness and too small for his vast presence. "But it is himself, himself, that my eager eye has alone time to scan. He is like a resting Mars or Bacchus or Alcides."Martial and Statius were no doubt supreme among the imperial flatterers. Each was the other's only serious rival. It is therefore not surprising that neither should breathe the other's name.

Even if we could by any stretch excuse the bearing of Statius towards Domitian, he could never be forgiven the poem entitled "The Hair of Flavius Earinus," Domitian's Ganymede, a poem than which it would be hard to find a more repulsive example of real poetical talent defiled for personal ends. Everything points to the conclusion that Statius did not survive his emperor - that he died, in fact, a short time after leaving Rome to settle in Naples.

Apart from the emperor and his minions, the friendships of Statius with men of high station seem to have been maintained on fairly equal terms. He was clearly the poet of society in his day as well as the poet of the court.

As poet, Statius unquestionably shines in many respects when compared with most other post-Augustans. He was born with exceptional talent, and his poetic expression is, with all its faults, richer on the whole and less forced, more buoyant and more felicitous, than is to be found generally in the Silver Age of Latin poetry.

Statius is at his best in his occasional verses, the Silvae, which have a character of their own, and in their best parts a charm of their own. The title was proper to verses of rapid workmanship, on everyday themes.Statius prided himself on his powers of improvisation, and he seems to have been quite equal to the feat, which Horace describes, of dictating two hundred lines in an hour while standing on one leg.

The improvisatore was in high honour among the later Greeks, as Cicero's speech for the poet Archias indicates; and the poetic contests common in the early empire did much to stimulate ability of the kind. It is to their velocity that the poems owe their comparative freshness and freedom, along with their loose texture and their inequality. There are thirty-two poems, divided into five books, each with a dedicatory epistle.

Of nearly four thousand lines which the books contain, more than five-sixths are hexameters. Four of the pieces (containing about 450 lines) are written in the hendecasyllabic metre, the "tiny metre of Catullus," and there is one Alcaic and one Sapphic ode.

Silvae

The subjects of the Silvae vary widely. Five poems are devoted to flattery of the emperor and his favourites; but of these enough has already been said. Six are lamentations for deaths, or consolations to survivors. Statius seems to have felt a special pride in this class of his productions; and certainly, notwithstanding the excessive and conventional employment of pretty mythological pictures, with other affectations, he sounds notes of pathos such as only come from the true poet.

There are often traits of an almost modern domesticity in these verses, and Statius, the childless, has here and there touched on the charm of childhood in lines for a parallel to which, among the ancients, we must go, strange to say, to his rival Martial.

One of the epicedia, that on Priscilla the wife of Abascantus, Domitian's freedman, is full of interest for the picture it presents of the official activity of a high officer of state.Another group of the Silvae give picturesque descriptions of the villas and gardens of the poet's friends. In these we have a more vivid representation than elsewhere of the surroundings amid which the grandees of the early empire lived when they took up their abode in the country.

As to the rest of the Silvae, the congratulatory addresses to friends are graceful but commonplace, nor do the jocose pieces call for special mention.In the Kalendae decembres we have a striking description of the gifts and amusements provided by the emperor for the Roman population on the occasion of the Saturnalia. In his attempt at an epithalamium (Silv. i.2) Statius is forced and unhappy.

His birthday ode in Lucan's honour has, along with the accustomed exaggeration, many powerful lines, and shows, high appreciation of preceding Latin poets. Some phrases, such as "the untaught muse of high-souled Ennius" and "the lofty passion of sage Lucretius," are familiar words with all scholars.

The ode ends with a great picture of Lucan's spirit rising after death on wings of fame to regions whither only powerful souls can ascend, scornfully surveying earth and smiling at the tomb, or reclining in Elysium and singing a noble strain to the Pompeys and the Catos and all the "Pharsalian host," or with proud tread exploring Tartarus and listening to the wailings of the guilty, and gazing at Nero, pale with agony as his mother's avenging torch glitters before his eyes.

It is singular to observe how thoroughly Nero had been struck out of the imperial succession as recognized at court, so that the "bald Nero" took no umbrage when his flatterer-in chief profanely dealt with his predecessor's name.

Epic poems

The epic poems of Statius are less interesting because cast in a commoner mould, but they deserve study in many respects. They are the product of long elaboration.

The Thebais, which the poet says took twelve years to compose, is in twelve books, and has for its theme the old "tale of Thebes" - the deadly strife of the Theban brothers. There is also preserved a fragment of an Achilleis, consisting of one book and part of another.

In the weary length of these epics there are many flowers of pathos and many little finished gem-pictures, but the trammels of tradition, the fashionable taste and the narrow bars of education check continually the poet's flight. Not merely were the materials for his epics prescribed to him by rigid custom, but also to a great extent the method by which they were to be treated.

All he could do was to sound the old notes with a distinctive timbre of his own. The gods must needs wage their wonted epic strife, and the men, their puppets, must dance at their nod; there most needs be heavenly messengers, portents, dreams, miracles, single combats, similes, Homeric and Virgilian echoes, and all the other paraphernalia of the conventional epic.

But Statius treats his subjects with a boldness and freedom which contrast pleasingly with the timid traditionalism of Silius Italicus and the stiff scholasticism of Gaius Valerius Flaccus. The vocabulary of Statius is conspicuously rich, and he shows audacity, often successful, in the use of words and metaphors.

At the same time he carried certain literary tricks to an aggravating pitch, in particular the excessive use of alliteration, and the misuse of mythological allusion. The best-known persons and places are described by epithets or periphrases derived from some very remote connection with mythology, so that many passages are as dark as Heraclitus.

References - This article incorporates text from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, which is in the public domain.

Gaius Valerius Flaccus (late 1st century AD) was a Roman poet, who flourished under the emperors Vespasian and Titus.He has been identified on insufficient grounds with a poet friend of Martial (i. 61. 76), a native of Padua, and in needy circumstances; but as he was a member of the College of Fifteen, who had charge of the Sibylline books (i. 5), he must have been well off. The subscription of the Vatican manuscript, which adds the name Setinus Balbus, points to his having been a native of Setia in Latium.

The only ancient writer who mentions him is Quintilian (Instil. Orat. x. I. 90), who laments his recent death as a great loss; as Quintilian's work was finished about AD 90, this gives a limit for the death of Flaccus.His major work, the Argonautica, dedicated to Vespasian on his setting out for Britain, was written during the siege, or shortly after the capture, of Jerusalem by Titus (70).

As the eruption of Vesuvius (79) is alluded to, it must have occupied him a long time. The Argonautica is an epic in eight books on the Quest for the Golden Fleece. The poem is in a very corrupt state, and ends abruptly with the request of Medea to accompany Jason on his homeward voyage.

It is a disputed question whether part has been lost or whether it was ever finished. It is a free imitation and in parts a translation of the work of Apollonius of Rhodes, already familiar to the Romans in the popular version of Varro Atacinus. The object of the work has been described as the glorification of Vespasian's achievements in securing Roman rule in Britain and opening up the ocean to navigation (as the Euxine was opened up by the Argo).

Various estimates have been formed of the genius of Flaccus, and some critics have ranked him above his original, to whom he certainly is superior in liveliness of description and delineation of character. His diction is pure, his style correct, his versification smooth though monotonous.

On the other hand, he is wholly without originality, and his poetry, though free from glaring defects, is artificial and elaborately dull.

His model in language was Virgil, to whom he is far inferior in taste and lucidity. His tiresome display of learning, rhetorical exaggeration and ornamentations make him difficult to read, which no doubt accounts for his unpopularity in ancient times.

Horatius Flaccus, Odes

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