Author: ALBINOVANUS, C. Pedo
Biography:
ALBINOVANUS, C. Pedo (c. first century BCE)
A friend of the poet Maecenas, possibly of the emperor Augustus, he was called sidereus (heavenly) by Ovid, q.v. He composed an epic poem on the subject of Germanicus, known to history only from 33 lines quoted by Seneca. The three elegies translated by John Plumptre (1754-1825) in 1807 were first attributed to Albinovanus by the sixteenth-century French classicist Joseph Scaliger. The current scholarly consensus, however, is that their authorship “cannot be ascertained for certain.” A graduate of Eton and Cambridge (BA 1777, MA 1780, DD 1808), Plumptre was the eldest son of the Rev. Septimus Plumptre and his wife, Catherine Young. His career in the Church of England was conventional and unheralded. He was vicar of several churches in Worcester and, through political influence, he obtained appointments at Worcester Cathedral: as canon in 1787; dean in 1808; and archdeacon in 1826. A “good classical scholar” (ODNB), he published translations of Milton and Pope in Greek. (Oxford Classical Dictionary 27 Jan. 2025; P. Mountford, Maecenas [2019], n.p.; NBG 1, col. 632; ODNB 28 Jan. 2025) JC