Marcus Aurelius Nemesianus was a Roman poet thought to have been a native of

Carthage Carthage was an ancient city in Northern Africa, on the eastern side of the Lake of Tunis in what is now Tunisia. Carthage was one of the most important trading hubs of the Ancient Mediterranean and one of the most affluent cities of the classic ...

and flourished about AD 283. He was a popular poet at the court of the Roman emperor

Carus Marcus Aurelius Carus ( – July or August 283) was Roman emperor from 282 to 283. During his short reign, Carus fought the Germanic tribes and Sarmatians along the Danube frontier with success. He died while campaigning against the Sassanid ...

(

Historia Augusta The ''Historia Augusta'' (English: ''Augustan History'') is a late Roman collection of biographies, written in Latin, of the Roman emperors, their junior colleagues, Caesar (title), designated heirs and Roman usurper, usurpers from 117 to 284. S ...

, ''Carus'', 11).

Bogus name "Olympius"

A bogus poet by the name of Olympius Nemesianus was mentioned in the

, where he was given authorship of two otherwise-unattested and probably imaginary works, ''Halieutica'' on fishing and ''Nautica'' on boating. It is likely that a gloss on the Historia Augusta noted the name "Cynegetica" in the margin in Greek letters, probably because the copyist recognized the name Nemesianus and wanted to use his limited knowledge of Greek; a later copyist moved it into the text of the Historia Augusta, and the name Olympius was conflated with the genuine Nemesianus.The Poet Nemesianus and the Historia Augusta. Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 August 2022. Justin Stover and George Woudhuysen https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-roman-studies/article/poet-nemesianus-and-the-historia-augusta/81388501F51D5CAEC1FEB2487E7F8481#

Works

The works below are by, or have been at times attributed to, Nemesianus:

Didactic poetry

Nemesianus wrote a poem on hunting ('' Cynegetica''); a fragment, 325

hexameter Hexameter is a metrical line of verses consisting of six feet (a "foot" here is the pulse, or major accent, of words in an English line of poetry; in Greek as well as in Latin a "foot" is not an accent, but describes various combinations of s ...

lines, has been preserved. It is neatly expressed in good

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

, and was used as a school textbook by Hincmar of Reims in the 9th century AD. The spoof work

gives to "Olympius Nemesianus" a work on the arts of fishing (''Halieutica'') and one on sailing (''Nautica''). Two fragments exist of a poem about bird catching (''De aucupio''), which are sometimes attributed to Nemesianus, although this attribution is considered doubtful.Hornblower, S. and Spawforth, A. (eds) (1996), the Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed. p 1033

The Eclogues

Four eclogues, formerly attributed to Titus Calpurnius Siculus, are now generally considered to be by Nemesianus.

The Praise of Hercules

The ''Praise of Hercules'', sometimes printed in Claudian's works, may be by him.

Editions

Complete edition of the works attributed to him in Emil Baehrens, ''Poetae Latini Minores'', iii. (1881); ''Cynegetica'': ed. Moritz Haupt (with

Ovid Publius Ovidius Naso (; 20 March 43 BC – AD 17/18), known in English as Ovid ( ), was a Augustan literature (ancient Rome), Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horace, with whom he i ...

's ''Halieutica'' and

Grattius Grattius (or Gratius) Faliscus was a Latin poetry, Roman poet who flourished during the life of Augustus (63 BC – 14 AD). He is known as the author of a ''Cynegetica'', a poem on hunting. Life The only reference to Grattius in any extant ancie ...

) 1838, and R. Stern, with Grattius (1832); Italian translation with notes by L. F. Valdrighi (1876). The four eclogues are printed with those of Calpurnius in the editions of H. Schenkl (1885) and Charles Haines Keene (1887); see L. Cisorio, ''Studio sulle Egloghe di Nemesiano'' (1895) and ''Dell' imitazione nelle Egloghe di Nemesiano'' (1896); and M. Haupt, ''De Carminibus Bucolicis Calpurnii et Nemesiani'' (1853), the chief treatise on the subject. The text of the ''Cynegetica'', the ''

Eclogues The ''Eclogues'' (; , ), also called the ''Bucolics'', is the first of the three major works of the Latin poet Virgil. Background Taking as his generic model the Greek bucolic poetry of Theocritus, Virgil created a Roman version partly by o ...

'', and the doubtful ''Fragment on Bird-Catching'' were published in Vol. II of ''Minor Latin Poets'' (

Loeb Classical Library The Loeb Classical Library (LCL; named after James Loeb; , ) is a monographic series of books originally published by Heinemann and since 1934 by Harvard University Press. It has bilingual editions of ancient Greek and Latin literature, ...

with English translations (1934).

References

External links

Nemesianus
Latin text and English translations in the Loeb edition, at LacusCurtius. {{DEFAULTSORT:Nemesianus Ancient Roman poets Post–Silver Age Latin writers 3rd-century Romans 3rd-century poets Aurelii 3rd-century writers in Latin