1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Nemesianus, Marcus Aurelius Olympius

NEMESIANUS, MARCUS AURELIUS OLYMPIUS, Roman poet, a native of Carthage, flourished about A.D. 283. He was a popular poet at the court of the Roman emperor Carus (Vopiscus, Carus, 11). He wrote poems on the arts of fishing (Halieutica), aquatics (Nautica) and hunting (Cynegetica), but only a fragment of the last, 325 hexameter lines, has been preserved. It is neatly expressed in good Latin, and was used as a school text-book in the 9th century. Four eclogues, formerly attributed to Titus Calpurnius (q.v.) Siculus, are now generally considered to be by Nemesianus, and the Praise of Hercules, generally printed in Claudian’s works, may be by him.

Complete edition of the works attributed to him in E. Bährens, Poetae Latini Minores, iii. (1881); Cynegetica: ed. M. Haupt (with Ovid's Halieutica and Grattius Faliscus) 1838, and R. Stern, with Grattius (1832); Italian translation with notes by L. F. Valdrighi (1876). The four eclogues are printed with those of Calpurnius in the editions of H. Schenkl (1885) and E. H. Keene (1887); see L. Cisorio, Studio sulle Egloghe di N. (1895) and Dell’ imitazione nelle Egloghe di N. (1896); and M. Haupt, De Carminibus Bucolicis Calpurnii et N. (1853), the chief treatise on the subject.