Quintus Caecilius Epirota

Quintus Caecilius Epirota (1st Century BC) was a freeman of Atticus, a grammarian, and the first person to initiate the public teaching of Virgil’s poetry.

Life

Atticus had employed Epirota to teach his daughter, but he became suspicious about the tutor’s attitude towards her, and dismissed him.[1] Epirota then found a patron in Gaius Cornelius Gallus, and after the latter’s fall set up his own independent teaching school.[2]

Works

Epirota is best known as the first person to discuss his contemporary, Virgil, in public and in Latin.[3] As Suetonius Tranquillus records, he was “the first to hold extempore discussions in Latin, and the first to begin the practice of reading Vergil and other recent poets”.[4]

See also

References
  1. H J Rose, A Handbook of Latin Literature (London 1966) p. 444
  2. A de Cassagnac, History of the Working and Burgher Classes (1871) p. 48
  3. D Matz, Famous Firsts in the Ancient Greek and Roman World (2000) p.93-6
  4. A Wallace, Virgil’s Schoolboys (Oxford 2013) p.4

Further reading
  • S F Bonner, Education in Ancient Rome (Berkeley 1977)

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