Varro Atacinus
Template:Short description Publius Terentius Varro Atacinus ({{#invoke:IPA|main}}; 82 – c. 35 BC) was a Roman poet, more polished in his style than the more famous and learned Varro Reatinus, his contemporary, and therefore more widely read by the Augustan writers.<ref name="Charles Thomas Cruttwell">Charles Thomas Cruttwell, History of Roman Literature (1877) Template:Webarchive: Book II, part I, note III</ref> He was born in the province of Gallia Narbonensis, the southern part of Gaul with its capital at Narbonne, on the river Atax<ref name=EB1911>Template:Cite EB1911</ref> (now the Aude), for his cognomen Atacinus indicates his birthplace.
WritingsEdit
Only fragments of his works survive. His first known works are {{#invoke:Lang|lang}},<ref name=Rose>H. J. Rose, A Handbook of Latin Literature (London 1967) p. 146</ref> a poem on Julius Caesar's campaign against Ariovistus, and some satires; these should not be confused with the Menippean Satires of the other Varro, of which some 600 fragments survive. He also wrote a geographical poem, Chorographia;<ref name=EB1911/> Ephemeris, a hexameter poem on weather-signs after Aratus, from which Virgil has borrowed<ref name=EB1911/> and (late in life) elegies to Leucadia.<ref name=Rose/>
His translation of the Alexandrian poet Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica into Latin has some fine surviving lines;<ref name=Rose/> and was singled out for praise by Ovid: “Of Varro too what age will not be told/And Jason’s Argo and the fleece of gold?”.<ref>A. D. Melville, trans., Ovid: The Love Poems (OUP 2008) p. 27 and p. 188</ref> Oskar Seyffert considered that the poem to have been “the most remarkable production in the domain of narrative epic poetry between the time of Ennius and that of Vergil”.<ref>O. Seyffert, A Dictionary of Classical Antiquities (London 1892) p. 619</ref>
Of Varro's fragments, the epigram on "The Tombs of the Great" is well-known; whether or not it is truly Varro's is debatable: Template:Verse translation
PatronsEdit
Cicero as well as Caesar have been suggested as possible patrons of Varro's writings.<ref>B. Gold ed., Literary and Artistic Patronage in Ancient Rome (2012) p. 91</ref>
See alsoEdit
NotesEdit
External linksEdit
- Fragments of Varro Atacinus, with Portuguese translation.