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Quintus Mucius Scaevola was a poet of the late Republic, known to Cicero, who quotes him in the opening of the De Legibus: speaking of the oak celebrated in Cicero’s own poem Marius, Scaevola declared that it “will grow white through countless ages.” Only a handful of words of his verse survive.
Fragments this brief cannot reveal the scale or design of the lost poetry, but they preserve the name and a trace of the voice of a Roman poet otherwise known only from passing references, and they show how much of Latin literature survives only through the quotations of grammarians and later writers.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Musisque Deoque, the digital archive of Latin poetry (edition: J. Blänsdorf, FPL, 1995), 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.