Gaius Oppius was an intimate friend of
Julius Caesar
Gaius Julius Caesar (; ; 12 July 100 BC – 15 March 44 BC), was a Roman general and statesman. A member of the First Triumvirate, Caesar led the Roman armies in the Gallic Wars before defeating his political rival Pompey in a civil war, and ...
. He managed the dictator's private affairs during his absence from Rome, and, together with
Lucius Cornelius Balbus, exercised considerable influence in the city.
According to
Suetonius
Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (), commonly referred to as Suetonius ( ; c. AD 69 – after AD 122), was a Roman historian who wrote during the early Imperial era of the Roman Empire.
His most important surviving work is a set of biographies ...
(''Caesar'', 56), many authorities considered Oppius to have written the histories of the Spanish, African and Alexandrian wars which were published as the works of Caesar himself. It is now generally held that he may possibly have written the
account of the Alexandrian war (although the claims of
Hirtius are considered stronger), but certainly not those of the Spanish and the African wars, although
Niebuhr (the Danish-German Romantic era historian) confidently assigned the ''Bellum Africanum'' to him. The writer of these latter accounts took an actual part in the wars they described, whereas Oppius was in Rome at the time.
Oppius also wrote a life of Caesar and the elder
Scipio.
[ Martin Schanz, ''Geschichte der römischen Literatur'', i. p. 210 (2nd ed., 1898); Teuffel-Schwabe, ''History of Roman Literature'' (Eng. trans.), 197; see also Cicero, ''Letters'', ed. ]R. Y. Tyrrell
R. or r. may refer to:
* ''Reign'', the period of time during which an Emperor, king, queen, etc., is ruler.
* '' Rex'', abbreviated as R., the Latin word meaning King
* ''Regina'', abbreviated as R., the Latin word meaning Queen
* or , abbreviat ...
and L. C. Purser
Carl Linnaeus (; 23 May 1707 – 10 January 1778), also known after his ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné Blunt (2004), p. 171. (), was a Swedish botanist, zoologist, taxonomist, and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, the ...
, iv. introd. p. 69.
After Caesar's death Oppius apparently wrote a pamphlet attempting to prove that
Caesarion,
Cleopatra
Cleopatra VII Philopator ( grc-gre, Κλεοπάτρα Φιλοπάτωρ}, "Cleopatra the father-beloved"; 69 BC10 August 30 BC) was Queen of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt from 51 to 30 BC, and its last active ruler.She was also a ...
's son, was not actually fathered by Caesar as she claimed.
[Duane W. Roller, ''Cleopatra: A Biography'', Oxford University Press US, 2010, pp.70-3]
References
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Oppius, Gaius
Ancient Roman politicians
1st-century BC Romans