Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 1, 2025
The literary men of the Ciceronian and Augustan age published their plays as a matter of course; Varius was coupled by his contemporaries with Virgil and Horace; and the lost Medea of Ovid, like the never-finished Ajax of Augustus, would be at the least a highly interesting literary document.
That is the trait surely that accounts for Horace's outburst of admiration. Animae quales neque candidiores Terra tulit. The seventh is an epigram mildly twitting Varius for his insistence upon pure diction.
The strict classicists are Horace the satirist, Varius a writer of epics, Pollio of tragedy; while Varus, Valgius, Plotius, and Fundanius, though less productive, employ their influence in the support of this tendency as does Tibullus somewhat later.
Again and again the orator in the Philippics charges Antony with having used Caesar's seal ring for lucrative forgeries in state documents. It is interesting to find that Vergil's school friend, Varius, in his poem on Caesar's death, called De Morte first put Cicero's charges into effective verse: Vendidit hic Latium populis agrosque Quiritum Eripuit: fixit leges pretio atque refixit.
The Thyestes of Varius and the Medea of Ovid were no doubt greatly improved copies of dramas of this sort. It will be seen from this survey of Alexandrine letters that the better side of their influence was soon exhausted. Any breadth of view they possessed was seized and far exceeded by the nobler minds that imitated it; and all their other qualities were such as to enervate rather than inspire.
The main interest which Varius has for us arises from his having, in company with Plotius Tucca, edited the Aeneid after Virgil's death.
That Varius should be called "A bird of Homeric song," appears so harsh to modern ears, that an emendation of the text has been proposed: but surely the learning of the ancients had been long ago obliterated, had every man thought himself at liberty to corrupt the lines which he did not understand.
After the pre-eminence of Virgil began to be recognised, Varius seems to have deserted epic poetry and turned his attention to tragedy, and that with so much success, that his great work, the Thyestes, was that on which his fame with posterity chiefly rested.
Virgil has confined his works within the compass of eighteen thousand lines, and has not treated many subjects, yet he ever had, and ever will have, the reputation of the best poet. Martial says of him that he could have excelled Varius in tragedy and Horace in lyric poetry, but out of deference to his friends he attempted neither.
Varius, when he abandoned tragedy, wrote epics on the death of Julius Caesar, and on the achievements of Agrippa. The few fragments of the former which survive show a remarkable power and refinement; Virgil paid them the sincerest of all compliments by conveying, not once only but again and again, whole lines of Varius into his own work.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking