Gaius Helvius Cinna was an influential neoteric poet of the late Roman Republic, a little older than the generation of Catullus and Licinius Calvus.
In life and in history, both ancient and modern, he was a victim of the limited range of Roman onomastics and the resultant great frequency of repetitions and homonyms. He shared the surname (cognomen) of the high noble (consular) aristocratic house of Corneli Cinnae, relatives by marriage of the fam...
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Gaius Helvius Cinna was an influential neoteric poet of the late Roman Republic, a little older than the generation of Catullus and Licinius Calvus.
In life and in history, both ancient and modern, he was a victim of the limited range of Roman onomastics and the resultant great frequency of repetitions and homonyms. He shared the surname (cognomen) of the high noble (consular) aristocratic house of Corneli Cinnae, relatives by marriage of the famous Caesar.
His magnum opus Smyrna established his literary fame; a mythological epic poem focused on the incestuous love of Smyrna (or Myrrha) for her father Cinyras, treated after the obscuritanist and excuriatingly allusive manner of the Alexandrian poets. It is said by Catullus to have taken nine years to finish.
This is the key information to survive about his life, together with a passage in the Suda about the Augustan period poet Parthenius of Bithynian Nikaia:
son of Herakleides and Eudora, though Hermippos says of Tetha. Nikaeus or...
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