One other circumstance has yet to be taken into account as affecting the culture and taste of the age, viz. the number of poets who lived at the time and the relations which subsisted between them. Those whose works have been preserved are only a few out of a larger circle who worked each in his own province of art, and listened to and criticised the works of their friends. Of the poets belonging to this circle whose works have not reached us, Varius, the older contemporary and life-long friend of Virgil, first acquired distinction as a writer of that kind of epic peculiar to Rome which treated of contemporary subjects and was dedicated to the personal glory of some great man. This kind of poem had probably originated with the 'Scipio' of Ennius, but it had been especially cultivated in the age of Cicero. Varius performed the office from which Virgil and Horace shrank, that, namely, of telling in verse the contemporary history of his own time, glorifying in one poem the memory of Julius Caesar, in another celebrating the wars of Augustus. Afterwards he resigned to Virgil the honours of epic poetry, and entered into rivalry with Pollio as the author of tragedy. His drama of Thyestes was represented at the Games celebrated after the battle of Actium, and for this drama he is said to have received a million sesterces(77). This play is praised both by Quintilian and Tacitus in the dialogue De Oratoribus. Quintilian says of it, 'it may be compared with any work of the Greeks:' but the drama is the branch of literature in which the judgment of a Latin critic is of least value. The Thyestes, like the Medea of Ovid, was probably a play of that rhetorical kind which was cultivated under the Empire, and which never got possession of the stage as the older tragedies of Attius and Pacuvius did. Cornelius Gallus has been already mentioned among the men of public eminence who cultivated poetry. He was a follower of the Alexandrians, and is mentioned by Propertius and Ovid as their own precursor in elegiac poetry. Aemilius Macer, a native of Verona, nearly of the same age as Virgil, and supposed to be shadowed forth as the Mopsus of the fifth Eclogue, was the author of a didactic poem called Ornithogonia, written in imitation of the Alexandrine Nicander. Valgius Rufus and Aristius Fuscus, mentioned by Horace as among the friendly critics by whom he wished his Satires to be approved, and to whom he addresses some of his Odes and Epistles, are also known as authors. In his later life Horace maintained friendly relations and correspondence with the younger men, such as Iulus Antonius, Florus, etc., who united a taste for poetry with the pursuits of young men of rank. And among the pleasures which Ovid recalls in the dreary days of his exile, none seem to have been more prized by him than the familiar relations in which he had lived with the older poets and with those of his own standing(78). The Alexandrine influence is visible in the kinds of poetry chiefly cultivated by these writers, especially in the didactic poem, the artificial epic, and the erotic elegy. We hear also of epic or narrative poems on contemporary subjects, of one or two dramatic writers, and also of writers in verse on grammatical and rhetorical subjects(79).