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{{short description|1st century BC Roman poet, orator and politician}}(File:Egitto romano, testa forse di g. cornelio gallo, 30 ac ca.jpg|thumb|Statue head possibly depicting Cornelius Gallus)Gaius Cornelius Gallus (c. 70 – 26 BC) was a Roman poet, orator, politician and military commander, at one time appointed by the Emperor Augustus as prefect of Egypt. Although only nine lines of his poetry are extant today, he was considered by Ovid as one of the major Latin poets of the 1st century BC.

Birthplace

The identity of Gallus’ purported birthplace, Forum Iulii,Encyclopædia Britannica;www.britannica.com/biography/Gaius-Cornelius-Gallus is still uncertain, and it is based on the epithet “Foroiuliensis” that Jerome gave to him.Jerome: Chronicles, Olympiad 188.17 (27 BC): In Roman times, there were several cities with this name, but a dispute about Gallus’ birthplace between Fréjus and the other cities is attested since the Renaissance.BOOK, Boucher, Jean-Paul, Caius Cornélius Gallus (= Bibliothèque de la Faculté des lettres de Lyon, 11), French, 1966, Les belles lettres, Paris, 6–11, During the 20th century, Ronald Syme took into consideration Fréjus and Cividale del Friuli, and called the former the more likely.JOURNAL, Ronald, Syme, 1938, The Origin of Cornelius Gallus, The Classical Quarterly, 39–44, 32, 1, 10.1017/S0009838800020747, 170795060, WEB,livingpoets.dur.ac.uk/w/Gallus:_A_Guide_to_Selected_Sources, Gallus: A Guide to Selected Sources - Living Poets, WEB,perseus.uchicago.edu/perseus-cgi/citequery3.pl?dbname=PerseusLatinTexts&getid=1&query=Suet.%20Gallus, Perseus Under Philologic: Suet. Gallus, perseus.uchicago.edu, dead,perseus.uchicago.edu/perseus-cgi/citequery3.pl?dbname=PerseusLatinTexts&getid=1&query=Suet.%20Gallus," title="web.archive.org/web/20160817095731perseus.uchicago.edu/perseus-cgi/citequery3.pl?dbname=PerseusLatinTexts&getid=1&query=Suet.%20Gallus,">web.archive.org/web/20160817095731perseus.uchicago.edu/perseus-cgi/citequery3.pl?dbname=PerseusLatinTexts&getid=1&query=Suet.%20Gallus, 2016-08-17, Jean-Paul Boucher recognized at least five candidates, and considered Forum Iulii Iriensium (modern Voghera) the most suitable.It has been also suggested that “Foroiuliensis” could refer not to Gallus’ birthplace, but rather to the place where he performed a memorable act, namely the erection of the Vatican obelisk in the Forum Iulium of Alexandria, thus making some generic mentions of Gallia as the sole possible clue about his place of origin.BOOK, Manzoni, Gian Enrico, Foroiuliensis poeta: vita e poesia di Cornelio Gallo, Italian, 1995, Vita e pensiero, Milan, 8834304667, 4–14,

Career

Born in a humble family, Gallus moved to Rome at an early age where he was taught by the same master as Virgil and Varius Rufus. Virgil, who was in great measure indebted to the influence of Gallus for the restoration of his estate, dedicated one of his eclogues (X) to him.{{sfn|Chisholm|1911}} The Erotica Pathemata of Parthenius of Nicaea was also dedicated to Gallus.In political life Gallus espoused the cause of Octavian and as a reward for his services was made prefect of Egypt (Suetonius, Augustus, 66).{{sfn|Chisholm|1911}} In 30 BC, Cornelius Gallus led a campaign to subdue a revolt in Thebes. He erected a monument in Philae to glorify his accomplishments.Hoffmann, Friedhelm; Minas-Nerpel, Martina; Pfeiffer, Stefan (2009). Die dreisprachige Stele des C. Cornelius Gallus. Archiv für Papyrusforschung, Beiheft 9. Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter. Gallus’ conduct brought him into disgrace with the emperor and a new prefect was appointed. After his recall, Gallus committed suicide (Cassius Dio, liii 23).

Poetic reputation

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. Along with Ennius, Varro Atacinus, Lucretius, Virgil, and Tibullus, Ovid includes him in a list of the most notable Latin poets, writing:Ovid, Amores 1.15.29–30.“Gallus shall be known in the West and in the East;and with Gallus his Lycoris shall also be known.“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.{{sfn|Chisholm|1911}} He is often thought of as a key figure in the establishment of the genre of Latin love-elegy, and an inspiration for Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid.Scholars used to believe, in the absence of any surviving poetry by Gallus and on the basis of his high reputation among his contemporaries, that his poetical gifts were little short of those of Virgil. The classicist Tenney Frank famously declared in 1922: ‘What would we not barter of all the sesquipedalian epics of empire for a few pages of Cornelius Gallus, a thousand for each!’T. Frank, Vergil: A Biography (1922) The discoveries at Qasr Ibrim have now given us nine lines of Gallus. Coincidentally, one of them mentions Lycoris, (’saddened, Lycoris, by your wanton behaviour’), confirming their authorship.

The surviving poetry of Gallus

Almost nothing by Gallus has survived; until 1978, only one line was known, quoted in Vibius Sequester’s De Fluminibus, with regard to the Hypanis river.Vibius Sequester, De fluminibus fontibus lacubus nemoribus paludibus montibus gentibus per litteras, in Alexander Riese, ed. (1878), Geographi Latini Minores, p. 148: The Hypanis was a name given to both the Southern Bug and the Kuban, which flows into the eastern side of the Sea of Azov; here Gallus appears to mean the Kuban (see: Dan, Anca. (2016). “The rivers called Phasis”. Ancient West & East, 15, 245-277; pages 263–4). However, most geographers of the period, such as Posidonius, Strabo (Geographica 11.7.4), and Ptolemy, regarded the Tanais (Don) to be the boundary between Europe and Asia. Both rivers flow into the Sea of Azov. See further: Boundaries between the continents. The line is a dactylic pentameter: ,“with its single stream it divides two continents,“BOOK, Hollis, Adrian, Fragments of Roman Poetry c. 60 BC–AD 20, 2007, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 978-0198146988, 224,www.oxfordscholarlyeditions.com/view/10.1093/actrade/9780198146988.book.1/actrade-9780198146988-book-1, 2 April 2021, Then, in 1978 a papyrus was found at Qasr Ibrim, in Egyptian Nubia, containing nine lines by Gallus, arguably the oldest surviving manuscript of Latin poetry.R.D. Anderson, P.J. Parsons, & R.G.M. Nisbet, “Elegiacs by Gallus from Qasr Ibrim”, Journal of Roman Studies 69 (1979) p. 128.The first readable line of the manuscript has only four words and appears to be the end of a poem or epigram complaining about Lycoris’s treatment of her lover:Merriam, C. U. (1990). “The New Gallus Revisited”. Latomus, T. 49, Fasc. 2 (AVRIL-JUIN 1990), pp. 443–452; see page 446.“sad because of your bad behaviour, Lycoris”.It has been arguedR.D. Anderson, P.J. Parsons, & R.G.M. Nisbet, “Elegiacs by Gallus from Qasr Ibrim”, Journal of Roman Studies 69 (1979) pp. 151–2. that the next four lines pay homage to Julius Caesar shortly before his assassination in 44 BC, on the eve of his projected campaign against the Parthians:“I will count myself blessed by fortune, Caesar, when youbecome the greatest part of Roman history;and when, after your return, I admire the temples of many godsadorned and enriched with your spoils.” This obsequious compliment need not be taken seriously. Later Augustan poets tended to distance themselves from the world of high politics and often drew a humorous contrast between the martial ambition of their ruler and their own ignoble love affairs. The next, missing, stanza may have subverted the sense, e.g. ‘As it is, while you’re off winning renown by conquering Parthia, I’m stuck here in Rome, with nothing to do but make love to Lycoris.’A second, incomplete, block of four lines appears to refer to Lycoris. So long as she likes his verses, Gallus seems to be saying, he can ignore any ‘peer reviews’ they might attract from critics such as Publius Valerius Cato and Viscus:“At last the Muses have made songswhich I can utter worthy of my mistress.So long as . . . [they are pleasing?] to you, I am not afraidto be judged by you, Viscus, . . . nor by you, Cato.“The fragments of 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;{{sfn|Chisholm|1911}} and Pomponius Gauricus’s ascription to him of the elegiac verses of Maximianus is no longer accepted.

“Gallus or Roman Scenes of the time of Augustus”

Gallus is the central figure in a fictionalised but fact-based account of the private life, manner and customs of the Romans: Gallus, or Roman Scenes of the time of Augustus, written by Professor Wilhelm Adolf Becker of Leipzig and published there in 1838. The work was translated into English by the Rev. Frederick Metcalfe in the 1840s.BOOK, Kassis, Dimitrios, 5 Feb 2015, Representations of the North in Victorian Travel Literature,books.google.com/books?id=x_umBgAAQBAJ, 9 March 2022, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 119, 978-1-443-87515-8, The 1898 Longmans, Green & Co. edition is available as a scan at the Internet Archive and is (2021) being prepared as an e-book by Project Gutenberg. The story of Gallus’s fall from Augustus’s favour forms the framework for an extensive learned discourse on what life was like in Rome as evidenced in Latin extracts from a number of writers (Suetonius, Martial, Pliny, Ovid, etc.) but most notably quotations in the Ancient Greek from Cassius Dio. The book contains extensive notes and ‘Excursus’ on various subjects including: the Roman Family, the Roman House, Books and Letters, Baths and Gymnastics, Dress, Banqueting, Drinking, and the Burial of the Dead.WEB,archive.org/details/gallusorromansce00beckiala, Gallus, 1898,

References

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• {{EB1911|wstitle=Gallus, Cornelius|volume=11|page=426}}

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