Author: VALERIUS FLACCUS, Gaius
Biography:
VALERIUS FLACCUS, Gaius (d c. 90 CE: Wikipedia)
Almost nothing is known of the life of the Roman poet Valerius Flaccus beyond the fact that he composed eight books of his epic Argonautica dedicated to the emperor Vespasian (which may or may not be incomplete) and that he died at some point between 90 and 95 CE. His translator Thomas Noble (q.v.) repeats some of the legends and inferences associated with him, as that he was born in Padua, that he was poor, and that he was a member of the College of Fifteen in charge of the Sybilline books. Flaccus worked in the shadow of Apollonius of Rhodes (q.v.), whose work he sometimes copies, and of Virgil (q.v.), whose style he does his best to imitate. Anticipating later commentators, Noble deplores his dependence on those two predecessors and maintains that he is in some ways a better poet than either. Noble’s translation appears to have been the first in English and he offered, if his version of the first book should be successful, to translate the remainder, but nothing further appeared. Interest in the subject may have been exhausted by the very recent translation of Apollonius by William Preston (q.v.). (Wikipedia 11 Feb. 2025; EB 11 Feb. 2025; Thomas Noble, Preface to The First Book of the Argonautica [1808]) HJ
Other Names:
- C. Valerius Flaccus