[89]
On the other
hand, although Cornelius Severus1 is a better versifier
than poet, yet if, as has been said, he had written his
poem on the Sicilian war in the same style throughout
as his first book, he would have had a just claim to the
second place. A premature death prevented the
powers of Serranus2 from ripening to perfection, but
his youthful works reveal the highest talent and a
devotion to the true ideal of poetry, which is remarkable in one so young.
1 Friend and contemporary of Ovid. A considerable fragment is preserved by Sen. Suas. vi. 26. The Sicilian War was the war with Sextus Pompeius (38–36) and perhaps formed a portion of a larger work on the Civil War. The surviving fragment deals with the death of Cicero. The priunus liber may therefore perhaps be the first book of this larger work.
2 Nothing is known of this poet except the name.
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1922.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.