Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1870) - Volume 2.djvu/241

Rh OALLUS. it would seem that he was instructed by the Epi- curean Syron, together with Varus and Virgil, both of whom became greatly attached to liim. ( Virg. Eclog. vi. 64, &c.) He began his career as a poet about the age of twenty, and seems thereby to have attracted the attention and won the friend- ship of such men as Asinius PoUio. (Cic. ad Fam. X. 32.) When Octavianus, after the murder of Caesar, came to Italy from Apollonia, Gallus must have embraced his party at once, for henceforth he appears as a man of great influence with Octavia- nus, and in B.C. 41 he was one of the triumviri appointed by Octavianus to distribute the land in the north of Italy among his veterans, and on that occasion he distinguished himself by the protection he aiforded to the inhabitants of Mantua and to Virgil, for he brought an accusation against Alfe- iius Varus, who, in his measurements of the land, was unjust towards the inhabitants. (Serv. ad Virg. Eclog. ix. 10 ; Donat. Vit. Virg. 30, 36.) Gallus afterwards accompanied Octavianus to the battle of Actium, B.C. 31, when he commanded a detachment of the army. After the battle, when Octavianus was obliged to go from Samos to Italy, to suppress the insurrection among the troops, he sent Gallus with the army to Egypt, in pursuit of Antony. In the neighbourhood of Gyrene, Pina- rius Scarpus, one of Antony's legates, in despair, surrendered, with four legions, to Gallus, who tlien took possession of the island of Pharus, and attacked Paraetonium. When tliis town and all its trea- sures had fallen into the hands of Gallus, Antony hastened thither, hoping to recover what was lost, sither by bribery or by force ; but Gallus thwarted his schemes, and, in an attack which he made on Antony's fleet in the liarbour of Paraetonium, he sunk and burnt many of the enemy's ships, where- upon Antony withdrew, and soon after made away with himself. Gallus and Proculeius then assisted Octavianus in securing Cleopatra, and guarded her as a prisoner in her palace. After the death of Cleopatra, Octavianus constituted Egypt as a Ro- man province, with peculiar regulations, and testi- fied his esteem for and confidence in Gallus by making him the first prefect of Egypt. (Strab. xvii. p. 819 ; Dion Cass. li. 9, 17.) He had to suppress a revolt in the Thebais, where the people resisted the severe taxation to which they were subjected. He remained in Egypt for nearly four years, and seems to have made various useful regu- lations in his province ; but the elevated position to which he was raised appears to have rendered him giddy and insolent, whereby he drew upon himself the hatred of Augustus. The exact nature of his oifence is not certain. According to Dion Cassius (liii. 23), he spoke of Augustus in an offensive and insulting manner ; he erected numerous statues of himself in Egypt, and had his own exploits in- scribed on the pyramids. This excited the hostility of Valerius LaVgus, who had before been his in- timate friend, but now denounced him to the em- peror. Augustus deprived him of his post, which was given to Petronius, and forbade him to stay in any of his provinces. As the accusation of Valerius had succeeded thus far, one accuser after another came forward against him, and the charges were referred to the senate for investigation and de- cision. In consequence of these things, the senate deprived Gallus of his estates, and sent him into exile; but, unable to bear up against these reverses of fortune, he put an end to his life by throw- GALLUS. 227 ing himself upon his own sword, B.C. 26. Other writers mention as the cause of his fall merely the disrespectful way in which he spoke of Augustus, or that he was suspected of forming a conspimcj-, or that he was accused of extortion in his province. (Comp. Suet. Aug. QQ, de Illustr. Gram. 16 ; Serv. ad Virg. Eclog. X. 1 ; Donat. Vit. Virg. 39 ; Amm. Marc. xvii. 4 ; Ov. Trist. ii. 445, Amor. iii. 9, 63; Propert. ii. 34. 91.) The intimate friendship existing between Gallus and the most eminent men of the time, as Asinius Pollio, Virgil, Varus, and Ovid, and the high praise they bestow upon him, sufficiently attest that Gallus was a man of great intellectual powers and acquirements, (^yi^ {Trist iv, 10. 5) assigns to him the first place among the Roman elegiac poets ; and we know that he wrote a collection of elegies in four books, the principal subject of which was his love of Lycoris. But all his productions have perished, and we can judge of his merits only by what his contemporaries state about him. A col- lection of six elegies was published under his name by Pomponius Gauricus (Venice, 1501, 4to), but it was soon discovered that they belonged to a much later age, and were the productions of Maximianus, a poet of the fifth century of our era. There are in the Latin Anthology four epigrams (Nos. 869, 989, 1003, and 1565, ed. Meyer], which were for- merlj"- attributed to Gallus, but none of them can have been the production of a contemporary of Augustus. Gallus translated into Latin the poems of Euphorion of Chalcis, but this translation is also lost. Some critics attribute to him the poem Ciris, usually printed among the works of Virgil, but the arguments do not appear {satisfactory. Of his oratory too not a trace has come down to us ; and how far the judgment of Quintilian (x. 1. § 93 ; comp. i. 5. § 8) is correct, who calls him durior Gcdltis, we cannot say. The Greek Antho- logy contains two epigrams under the name of Gallus, but who their author was is altogether un- certain. Some writers ascribe to C. Cornelius Gallus a work on the expedition of Aelius Gallus into Arabia, but he cannot possibly have written any such work, because he died before that expedi- tion was undertaken. (Fontanini, Hist. Lit. Aquir- lejaet lib. i. ; C. C. C. Volker, Commentat. de C. Comelii Galli Forojuliemis Vita et Scriptis, part i., Bonn, 1840, 8vo., containing the history of his life, and part ii., Elberfeld, 1844, on the writings of Gallus). A. W. Becker, in his Avork entitled Gallus, has lately made use of the life of Com."^ Gallus for the purpose of explaining the most im- portant points of the private life of the Romans in the time of Augustus. An English translation of this work was publislied in 1844. [L. S.] GALLUS, A. DI'DIUS, was curator aquarum in the reign of Caligula, A. d. 40. In the reign of Claudius, A. D. 50, he commanded a Roman army in Bosporus, and subsequently he was appointed by the same emperor to succeed Ostorius in Britain, where, however, he confined himself to protecting what the Romans had gained before, for he was then at an advanced age, and governed his pro- vince through his legates. In his earlier years he seems to have been a man of great ambition, and of some eminence as an orator. (Frontin. de Aquaed. 102 ; Tac. Ann. xii. 15, 40, xiv. 29, Agric. 14; Quintil. vi. 3. § 68.) [L. S.] GALLUS, FA'DIUS. 1. M. Fadius Gallus, an intimate friend of Cicero and Atticus, appears U 2