Cornelius Gallus

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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 26 BC, Cornelius Gallus led a campaign against the Nubian kingdoms and another to find Arabia Felix (Yemen). The campaign came quickly to a halt (25 BC) because of the heavy losses in the troops (Romans, Hebrews and Nabateans), due to hunger and epidemic. The losses were not recovered, so in 23 BC the Nubians, led by queen Candace Amanirenas, took the initiative and attacked the Romans moving towards Elephantine. Gallus' conduct brought him into disgrace with the emperor, and a new prefectus was named. Having been deprived of his estates and sentenced to banishment, 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. 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]