There has been no major critical edition of Velleius with commentary since that of Kritz in 1840. Kritz, who took into account Sauppe's long essay on Velleius of three years earlier, was preceded by Ruhnken, whose commentary appeared in 1779. During the century which followed Kritz's work several valuable editions without commentary were produced, the last of which, by Stegmann de Pritzwald (1933), almost coincided with the essay and bibliography devoted to Velleius in Schanz-Hosius (1935). These two contributions of the thirties remain standard to the present day.
In ‘the only coherent piece of autobiography which we possess from Horace's pen’, as Fraenkel has called it, the poet wrote these famous lines (Epist. 2.2.49–52):unde simul primum me dimisere Philippi,decisis humilem pinnis inopemque paterni 50et laris et fundi paupertas impulit audaxut uersus facerem.As soon as Philippi discharged me thence, poverty drove me grounded as I was, with my wings clipped, and deprived of my ancestral home and farm—boldly to produce verses.As is remarked by Lyne, however, ‘Horace here omits an intervening and prosaic stage’. The evidence for this omission comes from Suetonius' biography of the poet, in which the same period of Horace's life is described slightly differently: ‘uictisque partibus uenia impetrata scriptum quaestorium comparauit. ac primo Maecenati … insinuatus…’ (‘after the defeat of his party and a successful request for pardon he procured the position of scriba quaestorius. And having first become involved with Maecenas…’). What was the exact sequence of events? Lyne, like Brink, proposes that Horace after Philippi derived income from his position as scriba quacstorius and that this in turn enabled him to write the poetry which eventually brought him to Maecenas' attention. Nisbet, on the other hand, thinks that Horace's early poetry elicited subsidies from ‘grandees like Pollio and Messalla’ and that these provided him with the wherewithal to buy his position as scriba, from which he was effectively relieved by his later association with Maecenas.
in June 2002. I am most grateful to the Department of Classics there for the invitation to lecture; my thanks also go to those who commented on the paper on that and other occasions, in particular A
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.