A Dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology

and MAE'VIUS, whose names have become a by-word of scorn for all jealous and malevolent poetasters, owe their unenviable immortality solely to the enmity which they displayed towards the rising genius of the most distinguished of their contemporaries, and would probably never have been heard of but for the well-known line of Virgil (Ecl. 3.90):

1. Qui Bavium non odit amet tua carmina, Maevi

, the Epode of Horace where evil fortune is heartily anticipated to the ship which bore "rank Maevius" as its freight, and a caustic epigram by Domitius Marsus, in which one and probably both are wittily assailed. Upon the first of these passages we have the remark of Servius, "Maevius et Bavius pessimi fuerunt poetae, inimici tam Horatio quam Virgilio, unde Horatius Epod. x. etc." and again, upon the " serite hordea campis," in Georgic. 1.210, the same commentator observes, " sane reprehensus Virgilius dicitur a Bavio et Maevio hoc versu

Hordea qui dixit, superest ut tritica dicat,"

from which it would appear, that their attack was in the form of a poetical satire, and was moreover a joint undertaking. Philargyrius, in his exposition of the third Eclogue, after giving the same account of these personages as Servius, adds, that M. Bavius was a " curator," a designation so indefinite, that it determines nothing except the fact that he enjoyed some public appointment. Finally, St. Jerome, in the Eusebian chronicle, records that M. Bavius, the poet, stigmatised by Virgil in his Bucolics, died in Cappadocia, in the third year of the hundred and eighty-sixth Olympiad, that is, B. C. 35.

To one or other of these worthies has been attributed the practical joke played off upon Virgil, who, when rehearsing the first book of his Georgics, having chanced to make a pause after the words

1. Nudus ara, sere nudus

some one of the audience completed the verse by exclaiming:

1. habebis frigore febrem.

[W.R]