Parthenius of Nicaea

Parthenius of Nicaea was a Greek poet and grammarian who lived in the 1st century BC and 1st century AD. He was captured by the Roman general Cinna in the third Mithridatic war and taken to Rome as a prisoner in 72 BC. He later became the tutor of Virgil in Greek and a friend of Cornelius Gallus, to whom he dedicated his only surviving work, Erotica Pathemata. This work is a collection of 36 short stories of love and sorrow, drawn from various Greek sources, intended as a source of inspiration for Gallus' own poetry. Parthenius also wrote several poems, mostly elegies and epigrams, but none of them have survived except for a few fragments. He is sometimes called "the last of the Alexandrians" because of his style and influence. Parthenius died around 14 AD, during the reign of Tiberius.