Library › Latin: Epic › Fragment
Albinovanus Pedo, a friend of Ovid who served under Germanicus, wrote an epic on the campaigns in Germany. Its only substantial remnant, quoted by Seneca the Elder, is a passage of some twenty hexameters describing the fleet of Germanicus caught on the North Sea in AD 16: the sailors see day and sun left behind, venturing through forbidden darkness toward the edge of the world, and fear the monsters of the Ocean.
The passage is a powerful example of the Roman sense of the Ocean as the boundary of the known world, and it was quoted by Seneca as an instance of vivid description. It is the most important surviving fragment of Latin historical epic between Virgil and Lucan.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Musisque Deoque, the digital archive of Latin poetry (edition: J. Blänsdorf, FPL, 2011), licensed CC BY-SA. Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.