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 operas as Madame Chrysanthème (1893), Mirette (1894), Les Petites Michus (1897), and Véronique (1898), the latter of which had a great success in London. Besides conducting for some years at the Opéra Comique in Paris, Messager’s services were also secured in London in 1901 and later years as one of the directors of the Covent Garden opera.

MESSALLA CORVINUS, MARCUS VALERIUS (64 8), Roman general, author and patron of literature and art. He was educated partly at Athens, together with Horace and the younger Cicero. In early life he became attached to republican principles, which he never abandoned, although he avoided offending Augustus by too open an expression of them. He moved that the title of pater patriae should be bestowed upon Augustus, and yet resigned the. appointment of praefect of the city after six days’ tenure of office, because it was opposed to his ideas of constitutionalism. In 43 he was proscribed, but managed to escape to the camp of Brutus and Cassius. After the battle of Philippi (42) he went over to Antony, but subsequently transferred his support to Octavian. In 31 Messalla was appointed consul in place of Antony, and took part in the battle of Actium. He subsequently held commands in the East, and suppressed the revolted Aquitanians; for this latter feat he celebrated a triumph in 27.

Messalla restored the road between Tusculum and Alba, and many handsome buildings were due to his initiative. His influence on literature, which he encouraged after the manner of Maecenas, was considerable, and the group of literary persons whom he gathered round him—including Tibullus, Lygdamus and the poet Sulpicia—has been called “the Messalla circle.” With Horace and Tibullus he was on intimate terms, and Ovid expresses his gratitude to him as the first to notice and encourage his work. The two panegyrics by unknown authors (one printed among the poems of Tibullus as iv. 1, the other included in the Catalepton, the collection of small poems attributed to Virgil) indicate the esteem in which he was held. Messalla was himself the author of various works, all of which are lost. They included Memoirs of the civil Wars after the death of Caesar, used by Suetonius and Plutarch; bucolic poems in Greek; translations of Greek speeches; occasional satirical and erotic verses; essays on the minutiae of grammar. As an orator, he followed Cicero instead of the Atticizing school, but his style was affected and artificial. Later critics considered him superior to Cicero, and Tiberius adopted him as a model. Late in life he wrote a Work on the great Roman families, wrongly identified with an extant poem De progenie Augusti Caesaris bearing the name of Messalla, but really a 15th-century production.

Two other members of this distinguished family of the Valerian gens may be mentioned:—

1., father of the preceding, consul in 53 He was twice accused of illegal practices in connexion with the elections; on the first occasion he was acquitted, in spite of his obvious guilt, through the eloquence of his uncle Quintus Hortensius; on the second he was condemned. He took the side of Caesar in the civil war. Nothing appears to be known of his later history. He was augur for fifty-five years and wrote a work on the science of divination.

2., consul 263 In this year, with his colleague Manius Otacilius (or Octacilius) Crassus, he gained a brilliant victory over the Carthaginians and Syracusans; the honour of a triumph was decreed to him alone. His relief of Messana obtained him the cognomen Messalla, which remained in the family for nearly 800 years. To commemorate his Sicilian victory, he caused it to be pictorially represented on the wall of the Curia Hostilia, the first example of an historical fresco at Rome. He is said also to have brought the first sun-dial from Catana to Rome, where it was set up on a column in the forum.

MESSALLINA, VALERIA, the third wife of the, Roman emperor (q.v.). She was notorious for her profligacy, avarice and ambition, and exercised a complete ascendancy over her weak-minded husband, with the help of his all-powerful freedmen. During the absence of Claudius from the city, Messallina forced a handsome youth named Gaius Silius to divorce his wife and go through a regular form of marriage with her. The freedman Narcissus, warned by the fate of another freedman Polybius, who had been put to death by Messallina, informed Claudius of what had taken place, and persuaded him to consent to the removal of his wife. She was executed in the gardens of Lucullus, which she had obtained on the death of Valerius Asiaticus, who through her machinations, had been condemned on a charge of treason. She was only twenty-six years of age. By Claudius she was the mother of the unfortunate Britannicus, and of Octavia, wife of Nero.

MESSAPII, an ancient tribe which inhabited, in historical times, the south-eastern peninsula or “heel” of Italy, known variously in ancient times as Calabria, Messapia and Iapygia. Their chief towns were Uzentum, Rudiae, Brundisium and Uria. They are mentioned (Herod. vii. 170) as having inflicted a serious defeat on the Greeks of Tarentum in 473 Herodotus adds a tradition which links them to the” Cretan subjects of, “King Minos.” (Their language is preserved for us in a scanty group of perhaps fifty inscriptions of which only a few contain more than proper names, and in a few glosses in ancient writers collected by Mommsen (Unteritalische Dialekte, p. 70). Unluckily very few originals of the inscriptions are now in existence, though some few remain in the museum at Taranto. The only satisfactory transcripts are those given by (1) Mommsen (''loc. cit.) and by (2) I. P. Droop in the Annual of the British School at Athens (1905–1906), xii. 137, who includes, for purposes of comparison, as the reader should be warned, some specimens of the unfortunately numerous class of forged inscriptions. A large number of the inscriptions collected by Gamurrini in the appendices to Fabretti’s Corpus inscriptionum italicarum'' are forgeries, and the text of the rest is negligently reported. It is therefore safest to rely on the texts collected by Mommsen, cumbered though they are by the various readings given to him by various authorities. In spite, however, of these difficulties some facts of considerable importance have been established.

The inscriptions, so far as it is safe to judge from the copies of the older, finds and from Droop’s facsimiles of the newer, are all in the Tarentine-Ionic alphabet (with [ for v and Oscan I2.svg for h). For limits of date 400–150 may be regarded as approximately probable; the two most important inscriptions—those of Bindisi and Vaste—may perhaps be assigned provisionally to the 3rd century

Mommsen’s first attempt at dealing with the inscriptions and the language attained solid, if not very numerous, results, chief of which were the genitival character of the endings—aihi and ihi; and the conjunctional value of ini (loc. cit. 79–84 sqq.), Since that time (1850) very little progress has been made. There is, in fact, only one attempt known to the 'present writer to 'which the' student can be referred as proceeding upon thoroughly' scientific lines, that of Professor Alf Torp in Indogermanische Forschungen (1895), v., 195, which deals fully with the two inscriptions just mentioned, and practically sums up all that is either certain or probable in the conjectures of his predecessors; Hardly more than a few words can be said to have been separated and translated with certainty—kalatoras (masc. gen. sing.) “of a herald” (written upon a herald’s staff which was once in the Naples Museum); aran (acc. sing. fem.) “arable