Poet, born in Forum Julii (now Fréjus) in Gaul. He lived in Rome in intimate friendship with Virgil and Ovid, and was appointed prefect of Egypt by Augustus, but he fell into disfavour, and after being banished he committed suicide. From his four books of elegies upon his mistress Lycoris (the actress Cyntheris), he is considered the founder of the Roman elegy. Only a few fragments of his work are extant.
Gaius Cornelius Gallus (69 BC – 26 BC), was the first prefect of Roman Egypt.
He was born at Fréjus of humble parentage and first made his name in Rome as a poet.
He was an officer in the army which triumphed at the Battle of Actium, and pursued Mark Antony to Egypt, of which he was made governor. Fortunately, a peaceful settlement was worked out and Gallus' troops, almost stranded midway without water and supplies, were spared disaster.
Work
Unfortunately, only fragments remain of Gallus' work. We know that he was the author of four books of elegies, published under the title Amores, dedicated to a girl he calls Lycoris. Gallus' work was influenced by the Hellenistic poet of the third century BC, Euphorion of Chalcis. Servius tells us Gallus adapted some of the Greek poet's work, hexameters of mythological and geographical learning, into Latin. Familiar with the Alexandrian poets, he began to fuse his own personal experience into the mythological learning of Alexandrian elegy, giving the Latin elegiac genre its own form. Until recently, all that was left of the poet's work was a single quoted pentameter: uno tellures diuidit amne duas, "(the Scythian river) divides the two lands (Europe and Asia) with a single stream". Then, in 1979, a spectacular papyrus find at Qasr Ibrim in Egypt restored to us a set of ten verses from Gallus' work.
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