Parthenius of Nicaea

Parthenius was born in Nicaea (or perhaps Myrleia) in Bithynia, probably around 100 BC. He was captured by the Romans during the Mithridatic Wars and brought to Italy, where he was freed and became a literary figure in Roman intellectual circles. He was a teacher and friend of Virgil and the poet Cornelius Gallus.

His surviving work, the Erotica Pathemata (Sorrows of Love), is a collection of thirty-six brief mythological love stories, each summarising a tale of love that ends in suffering, transformation, or death. Parthenius compiled them from earlier Greek prose and verse sources as raw material for Cornelius Gallus to rework into Latin elegiac poetry.

The collection preserves outlines of myths known from lost works — many of the stories survive nowhere else. And it gives us a window into the working methods of Augustan poets: Parthenius was literally providing plot summaries for his Roman friends to versify.