GAIUS VALGIUS

See also:

• GAIUS VALGIUS RUFUS
• RUFUS, LUCIUS VARIUS (c 74—14 B.c.)

RUFUS  , Lain poet, friend of Horace and Maecenas, and consul in 12 B.C . He was known as a writer of elegies and epigrams, and his contemporaries believed him capable of great things in epic . The author of the panegyric on Messalla declares Rufus to be the only poet fitted to be the great man's Homer . Rufus did not, however, confine himself to poetry . He discussed grammatical questions by correspondence, translated the rhetorical manual of his teacher Apollodorus of Pergamum, and began a treatise on medicinal plants, dedicated to Augustus . Horace addressed to him the ninth ode of the second book . Fragments in R . Weichert, Poetarum Latinorum Vitae et Carminum Reliquiae (183o) ; R . Unger, De C . Valgii Rufi Poematis (1848) ; 0 . Ribbeck, Geschichte der romischen Dichtung (1889), ii . ; M .

Schanz, Geschichte der romischen Litteratur (1899), ii . 1;

Teuffel, Hist. of Roman Literature (Eng. trans., 1900), 241 .