MARCUS VELLEIUS PATERCULUS (c. 19 B.C.-c. A.D. 31)  , Roman historian . Although his praenomen is given as Marcus by Priscian, some modern scholars identify him with Gaius Velleius Paterculus, whose name occurs in an inscription on a north African milestone (C.I.L. viii. to, 311) . He belonged to a distinguished Campanian family, and early entered the army . He served as military tribune in Thrace, Macedonia, Greece and the East, and in A.D . 2 was present at the interview on the Euphrates between Gaius Caesar, grandson of Augustus, and the Parthian king . Afterwards, as praefect of cavalry and legatus, he served for eight years (from A.D . 4) in Germany and Pannonia under Tiberius . For his services he was rewarded with the quaestorship in 7, and, together with his brother, with the praetorship in 15 . He was still alive in 3o, for history contains many references to the consulship of M . Vinicius in that year . It has been conjectured that he was put to death in 31 as a friend of Sejanus, whose praises he celebrates in a most fulsome manner . He wrote a compendium of Roman history in two books dedicated to M .

Vinicius, from the

dispersion of the Greeks after the siege of Troy down to the death of Livia (A.D . 29) . The first book brings the history down to the destruction of Carthage, 146 B.C.; portions of it are wanting, including the beginning . The later history, especially the period from the death of Caesar, 44 B.C., to the death of Augustus, A.D . 14, is treated in much greater detail . Brief notices are given of Greek and Roman literature, but it is strange that no mention is made of Plautus, Horace and Propertius . The author is a vain and shallow courtier, and destitute of real historical insight, although generally trustworthy in his statements of individual facts . He may be regarded as a courtly annalist rather than an historian . His knowledge is superficial, his blunders numerous, his chronology inconsistent . He labours at portrait-painting, but his portraits are daubs . On Caesar, Augustus and above all on his patron Tiberius, he lavishes praise or flattery . The repetitions, redundancies, and slovenliness of expression which disfigure the work may be partly due to the haste with which (as the author frequently reminds us) it was written .

Some blemishes of

style, particularly the clumsy and involved structure of his sentences, may perhaps be ascribed to insufficient literary training . The inflated rhetoric, the straining after effect by means of hyperbole, antithesis and epigram, mark the degenerate taste of the Silver Age, of which Paterculus is the earliest example . He purposed to write a fuller history of the later period, which should include the civil war between Caesar and Pompey and the wars of Tiberius; but there is no evidence that he carried out this intention . His chief authorities were Cato's Origines, the Annales of Q . Hortensius, Pompeius Trogus, Cornelius Nepos and Livy . Velleius Paterculus was little known in antiquity . He seems to have been read by Lucan and imitated by Sulpicius Severus, but he is mentioned only by the scholiast on Lucan, and once by Priscian . The text of the work, preserved in a single badly written and mutilated MS . (discovered by Beatus Rhenanus in 1515 in the abbey of Murbach in Alsace and now lost), is very corrupt . Editio princeps, 1520; early editions by the great scholars Justus Lipsius, J . Grater, N . Heinsius, P .

Burmann; modern editions, Ruhnken and Frotscher (1830-39), J . C . Orelli (1835), F . Kritz (1840, ed. min . 1848), F . Haase (1858), C . Halm (1876), R . Ellis (1898) (reviewed by W . Warde Fowler in Classical Review, May 1899) ; on the sources see F . Burmeister, " De Fontibus Vellei Paterculi," in Berliner Studien fair classische Philologie (1894), xv . English translation by J . S .

Watson in Bohn's Classical Library .