More important in their own day were two friends of Catullus, Gaius Licinius Calvus and Gaius Helvius Cinna. Calvus and Cinna. Calvus, who lived from 87 to 47 B. C., was a distinguished orator and politician, who devoted his leisure hours to poetry. His poems included epithalamia, elegies, epigrams, and at least one mythological epyllion, entitled Io. Cinna appears to have come, like Catullus, from northern Italy, but of his life little is known beyond the fact that he was with Catullus on the staff of Memmius in Bithynia. His chief work was a poem entitled Smyrna, which, although it was of moderate length, occupied him for nine years. The subject was the unnatural love of the maiden Smyrna for her father and the birth of their son Adonis. The poem was so learned and obscure as to be almost incomprehensible, and was similar in this respect to the Alexandra of the Alexandrian Lycophron. The admiration expressed by Catullus for this work shows how highly the younger Roman poets esteemed successful imitations of even the worst faults of their Alexandrian models.
A poet who continued the national traditions of Ennius and also imitated the Alexandrians was Publius Terentius Varro, called Varro Atacinus. Varro Atacinus. He was born at Atax, in Gallia Narbonensis, in 82 B. C. He wrote a poem in hexameters on Cæsar’s war with the Sequani, and some satires, probably in the manner of Lucilius, In his thirty-fifth year he is said to have turned to the study of the Greek poets, and it is probably about this time that he translated into Latin hexameters the Argonautica of the Alexandrian epic poet Apollonius Rhodius. A geographical poem, probably entitled Chorographia, and a series of elegiac poems in the Alexandrian manner probably belong to the time after the year 37 B. C. The few fragments of his poems show that he was a poet of more than ordinary gifts.
Valerius Cato.The intellectual leader of the school of poets who found their inspiration in the works of the Alexandrians was the grammarian and teacher, P. Valerius Cato, whom Eurius Bibaculus calls “Cato the grammarian, the Latin Siren, who alone reads and makes poets.” Cato’s influence was exerted to lead his followers to imitate their Greek models carefully, to perfect their Latin style, and probably to introduce the new metres into Latin poetry. His own writings were grammatical treatises, poems, and a revision and correction of the works of Lucilius. The poem entitled Diræ, which is contained in manuscripts of Virgil, and really consists of two distinct poems, Diræ and Lydia, has been ascribed with some probability to Cato. In the first poem the writer curses a veteran named Lycurgus, who has deprived him of his property and his beloved Lydia; in the second he addresses a touching farewell to Lydia, who has remained in the country. Other poets. Other poets of this period are M. Furius Bibaculus, who wrote satirical verses, Gaius Memmius, the proprætor of Bithynia in 57 B. C., Ticidas, Quintus Cornificius, and Cornelius Nepos—all of whom belonged to the new school and imitated the Alexandrians. Nepos we shall meet again among the prose writers. Others also, whose chief activity was in other fields, wrote poetry occasionally. Among these Cicero and his brother Quintus may be mentioned.
The names of these lesser poets are of little importance to us, but it is worth while to mention them to call attention to the fact that poetry was cultivated by many of the younger men in the Ciceronian period. Through their efforts the various styles and metres of the Greek poets, especially those of the Alexandrian period, were made familiar to the Romans, and thus the way was prepared for Horace, Virgil, and Ovid in the Augustan age.
CICERO.
Bust in the Vatican Museum, Rome.