Page:Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.djvu/70

58 Besides these distinguished names, others almost as well known might be enumerated among the more worthy associates of Catullus; for instance, Asinius Pollio, the friend of Virgil and Horace, the scholar, poet, and public man, to whose refinement and taste he testifies in Poem xii. ("To Marrucinus Asinius"); Varus, whose other name was more probably Quintilius than Alphenus, and who will then be the accomplished scholar and soldier from Catullus's own neighbourhood, Cremona, to whose memory Horace pays such a touching tribute; and Helvidius Cinna, the poet who at Cæsar's funeral was killed by the rabble in mistake for his namesake Cornelius Cinna, and of whom we get a notice in Shakespeare's "Julius Cæsar," and in Plutarch. His famous work was a probably epic poem named "Smyrna," of which only a couple of verses are extant; but if we may accept Catullus's friendly judgment, the example of Cinna in taking nine years to elaborate his epic, was one that other poets might with advantage follow; and a favourable tradition of him has clung to the grammarian. He is mentioned above in the poem about a visit to Varus's mistress, apropos of the sedan from Bithynia; and in Poem xcv. there is some light afforded to the elaborate character of his great work. It is given in Mr Robinson Ellis's elegiacs, more for their exactness than their elegance:—