Extract

Terentius Varro Atacinus, Publius, a poet born in the Atax (Aude) valley in Gallia Narbonensis or at *Narbo itself in 82 bce. Nothing is known of his life except that he learned Greek at the age of thirty-five (Jerome, Chronicle ). The first of his poems was no doubt his Bellum Sequanicum , an historical epic on Caesar's campaign of 58 bce. After he made the acquaintance of Greek literature, he translated *Apollonius (1) Rhodius under the title Argonautae , wrote amatory verse addressed to a “Leucadia” (Prop. 2.34.85; Ov. Tr. 2.439), a name chosen, like “Lesbia,” to recall *Sappho (if this was in elegiacs it was his only work not in hexameters), and composed two didactic works, Chorographia (which seems to show knowledge of Alexander of Ephesus) and Ephemeris (the title is an emendation), a poem on weather forecasting in which he used *Aratus (1) (his version influenced Virgil's treatment of the same topic in G.