LUCIUS VARIUS

See also:

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

RUFUS (c 74—14 B.c.)  , Roman poet of the Augustan age . He was the friend of Virgil, after whose death he and Plotius Tucca prepared the Aeneid for publication, and of Horace, for whom he and Virgil obtained an introduction to Maecenas . Horace speaks of him as a master of epic and the only poet capable of celebrating the achievements of Vipsanius Agrippa (Odes, i . 6); Virgil (under the name of Lycidas, Ed. ix . 35) regrets that he had hitherto produced nothing comparable to the work of Varius or Helvius Cinna . From Macrobius (Saturnalia, vi . 1, 39; 2, 19) we learn that Varius composed an epic poem De Morte, some lines of which are quoted as having been imitated or appropriated by Virgil; Horace (Sat. i . 1o, 43) probably alludes to another epic, and, according to the scholiast on Epistles, i . 16, 27—29, these three lines are taken bodily from a panegyric of Varius on Augustus . But his most famous literary production was the tragedy Thyestes, which Quintilian (Inst . Oral. x . 1, 98) declares fit to rank with any of the Greek tragedies .

The didascalia (which is preserved in a

Paris MS.) informs us that it was produced at the games celebrated (29 B.C.) by Augustus in honour of the victory at Actium, and that Varius received a present of a million sesterces from the emperor . Fragments in E . Bahrens, Frag . Poetarum Romanorum (1886); monographs by A . Weichert (1836) and R . Unger (187o, 1878, 1898) ; M . Schanz, Geschichte der romischen Litteratur (1899), ii. r; Teuffel, Hist. of Roman Literature (Eng. trans., 1900), 223 .