A Dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology

the author of a poem upon the chase, of whom only one undoubted notice is to be found in ancient writers. This is contained in the Epistles from Pontus (4.16, 33), where Ovid speaks of him as a contemporary in the same couplet with Virgil:--

1. Tityrus antiquas et erat qui pasceret herbas,
2. Aptaque venanti Gratius arma daret.

(Comp. Cyneget. 23.) Some lines in Manilius have been supposed to allude to Gratius, but the terms in which they are expressed (Astron. 2.43) are too vague to warrant such a conclusion. Wernsdorf, arguing from the name, has endeavoured, not without some shadow of reason, to prove that he must have been a slave or a freedman, but the rest of his conjectures are mere fantasies. The cognomen, or epithet, Faliscus, was first introduced by Barth, on the authority of a MS. which no one else ever saw, and probably originated in a forced and false interpretation of one (of the lies in the poem, "At contra nostris

imbellia lina Faliscis " (5.40), where, upon referring to the context, it will at once be seen that nostris here denotes merely italian, in contradistinction to the various foreign tribes spoken of in the preceding verses.

[W.R]