Valerius Flaccus
Valerius Flaccus (Gaius Valerius Flaccus Setinus Balbus),Roman poet, author of the Argonautica, an epic poem on the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts to Colchis in search of the Golden Fleece. There is no external evidence for his biography apart from Quintilian's remark (c. AD 95) that ‘we have recently suffered a great loss in Valerius Flaccus’ (10. 1. 90); since Quintilian can use ‘recent’ of Caesius Bassus' death in AD 79 (10. 1. 96), the conventional dating of Valerius' death to the early 90s is without foundation. The evidence of the poem itself is controversial. The conventional claim that Valerius was a quindecimvir sacris faciundis (member of a college of fifteen men whose job it was to look after certain ritual texts) is based on lines in the proem which by no means dictate such a conclusion (1. 5–7). The one certainty is the reference in a simile to the eruption of Vesuvius, which occurred on 24 August 79 (4. 507–9;...
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