Abronius Silo

Abronius Silo (fl. 1st century BC) was a Latin poet who lived in the latter part of the Augustan age. Silo is mentioned in the suasoriae of Seneca the Elder. Seneca wrote that he was a pupil of the rhetorician Marcus Porcius Latro. According to Seneca, he plagiarized a poem about the Illiad from his Latro.[1][2] The plagiarized line read:[3]

Danai, magnum paeana canentes, ite triumphantes: belli mora concidit Hector

Translated into English this quote reads:[4]

Go forward, Greeks, singing a great paean, go victorious: Hector, the brake on the war, has fallen

Seneca also wrote that he fathered another poet, also named Silo, who wrote poetry intended for pantomimes.[5] Which Seneca considered to be a waste of his talents.[6][7]

References

1. McGill, Scott (2012-07-05). Plagiarism in Latin Literature. Cambridge University Press. pp. 167–168. ISBN 978-1-139-53665-3.
2. Garrison, Irene Peirano (2019-08-22). Persuasion, Rhetoric and Roman Poetry. Cambridge University Press. p. 69. ISBN 978-1-107-10424-2.
3. Trinacty, Christopher (2009). "Like Father, Like Son?: Selected Examples of Intertextuality in Seneca the Younger and Seneca the Elder". Phoenix. 63 (3/4): 271–272. ISSN 0031-8299 – via JSTOR.
4. "Plagiarism or Imitation?: The Case of Abronius Silo in Seneca the Elder's Suasoriae 2.19–20". Project Muse. Retrieved September 7, 2020.
5. Jory, John (2008-11-20). "The Pantomime Dancer and his Libretto". In Hall, Edith; Wyles, Rosie (eds.). New Directions in Ancient Pantomime. OUP Oxford. pp. 158–159. ISBN 978-0-19-923253-6.
6. Seneca the Elder. Suasoriae. 2.19.
7. Smith, William (1867), "Abronius Silo", in Smith, William (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, vol. 1, p. 3, archived from the original on 2005-12-31, retrieved 2007-09-08

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Smith, William (1870). "Abronius Silo". In Smith, William (ed.). Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. p. 3.