Marcus Aurelius Olympius Nemesianus

Marcus Aurelius Olympius Nemesianus, Roman poet, a native of Carthage, flourished about AD 283.

He was a popular poet at the court of the Roman emperor Carus (Historia Augusta, "Carus", 11). He wrote poems on the arts of fishing ("Halieutica"), aquatics ("Nautica") and hunting ("Cynegetica"), but only a fragment of the last, 325 hexameter lines, has been preserved. It is neatly expressed in good Latin, and was used as a school text-book in the 9th century.

Four eclogues, formerly attributed to Titus Calpurnius Siculus, are now generally considered to be by Nemesianus, and the "Praise of Hercules", sometimes printed in Claudian's works, may be by him.

Complete edition of the works attributed to him in Emil Baehrens, "Poetae Latini Minores", iii. (1881); "Cynegetica": ed. Moritz Haupt (with Ovid's "Halieutica" and Grattius) 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", and the doubtful "Fragment on Bird-Catching" were published in Vol. II of "Minor Latin Poets" (Loeb Classical Library with English translations (1934).

External links

* [http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Nemesianus/home.html Nemesianus] , Latin text and English translations in the Loeb edition, at LacusCurtius.