Gaius Cornelius Gallus

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Gaius Cornelius Gallus (69 BC – 26 BC), was the first prefect of Roman Egypt.

He was born at Fréjus of humble parentage and first made his name in Rome as a poet. During the disturbances following the assassination of Julius Caesar, he attached himself to the party of Octavian and was appointed to the commission for distribution of farms to veterans in the north of Italy, where he is supposed to have met Virgil.

He was an officer in the army which triumphed at the Battle of Actium, and pursued Mark Antony to Egypt, of which he was made governor. After four years, during which he extended and consolidated Roman rule to the south, he began to pursue a policy of self-aggrandisement in the province; this entailed securing permission from Augustus to engage in an invasion of Arabia Felix. Fortunately, a peaceful settlement was worked out and Gallus' troops, almost stranded midway without water and supplies, were spared disaster. Nevertheless, he was recalled and exiled; shorty afterwards he committed suicide.

[edit] Work

Unfortunately, only fragments remain of Gallus' work. We know that he was the author of four books of elegies, published under the title Amores, dedicated to a girl he calls Lycoris. This was a pseudonym of the Greek mime actress Cytheris, a freedwoman of Volumnius. Gallus' work was influenced by the Hellenistic poet of the third century BC, Euphorion of Chalcis. Servius tells us Gallus adapted some of the Greek poet's work, hexameters of mythological and geographical learning, into Latin. Familiar with the Alexandrian poets, he began to fuse his own personal experience into the mythological learning of Alexandrian elegy, giving the Latin elegiac genre its own form. Gallus was greatly admired in his own day. His close friend Virgil dedicated the tenth eclogue to his honour. 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 arguably the oldest manuscript of Latin poetry to survive.