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Updated: May 1, 2025
ROMAN TRAGEDY. While Roman comedy was brought to perfection under the influence of Greek literature, Roman tragedy, on the other hand, was transplanted from Athens, and, with few exceptions, was never anything more than translation or imitation. In after ages, Rome did not produce one tragic poet, unless Varius be considered an exception.
The intimate friendship that existed between the two poets enabled Varius to give to the world many particulars as to Virgil's character and habits of life; this biographical sketch, which formed probably an introduction to the volume, is referred to by Quintilian and others. A poet of inferior note, but perhaps handed down to unenviable immortality in the line of Virgil
On the other hand the tribune Marcus Plautius Silvanus, who entered on his office on the 10th of December of the same year, carried a law which took the commission of high treason out of the hands of the capitalist jurymen, and entrusted it to other jurymen who were nominated by the free choice of the tribes without class qualification; the effect of which was, that this commission was converted from a scourge of the moderate party into a scourge of the ultras, and sent into exile among others its own author, Quintus Varius, who was blamed by the public voice for the worst democratic outrages the poisoning of Quintus Metellus and the murder of Drusus.
Varus, Pollio, and Varius were old enough to know Catullus and Calvus personally, to remember the days when poems like Dianae sumus in fide were just issued, and they were poets who could value the perfect art of such work even after the authors of them had been enticed by ambition into dangerous by-paths.
But Horace's dignified candor won him the confidence of Maecenas; and that there might be no misunderstanding he included in his first book of Satires a simple account of what he was and hoped to be. Thus through the efforts of Vergil and Varius he entered the circle whose guiding spirit he was destined to become.
Many more once existed, of various merit, and of different authors, which have left few or no memorials behind them, but have perished promiscuously amidst the indiscriminate ravages of time, of accidents, and of barbarians. Amongst the principal authors whose works are lost, are Varius and Valgius; the former of whom, besides a panegyric upon Augustus, composed some tragedies.
The crusade for purity of speech had been given a new impetus a decade before by the Atticists, and we may here infer that Varius, the quondam friend of Catullus, was considered the guardian of that tradition. Vergil, despite his devotion to neat technique, may have had his misgivings about rules that in the end endanger the freedom of the poet.
On the proposal of the tribune Quintus Varius, in spite of the resistance of the Optimates and in spite of tribunician interference, a special commission of high treason formed, of course, from the equestrian order which contended for the proposal with open violence was appointed for the investigation of the conspiracy instigated by Drusus and widely ramified in Italy as well as in Rome, out of which the insurrection had originated, and which now, when the half of Italy was under arms, appeared to the whole of the indignant and alarmed burgesses as undoubted treason.
But we have reason to believe that the Opus Alexandrinum in two of the chapels of Santa Maria degli Angeli was taken from the Baths of Diocletian; while the splendid pavement of the whole church, naves, transept, and choir of Santa Croce in Jerusalemme, formed originally part of the decorations of the Sessorian Palace of Sextus Varius, the father of Heliogabalus, after whom the church is sometimes called the Sessorian Basilica.
But I shall give my opinion of every one in such explicit terms, that it may be easily understood whom I consider as a mere Declaimer, and whom as an Orator." "About the same time, or rather something later than the above-mentioned Julius, but almost cotemporary with each other, were C. Cotta, P. Sulpicius, Q. Varius, Cn.
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