Ninnius Crassus was a Roman writer who translated the Greek Iliad into Latin hexameters.Sander M. Goldberg, Epic in Republican Rome (Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 135. Nothing about his life is known.Edward Courtney (ed.), The Fragmentary Latin Poets (Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 107. He may have lived in the early 1st century BC.The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th ed. (Oxford University Press, 2012), s.v. "Ninnius Crassus". Only one and a half lines of Ninnius' translation are extant.Reinhold F. Glei, "The Ilias Latina as a Roman Continuation of the Iliad", in Robert C. Simms (ed.), Brill's Companion to Prequels, Sequels, and Retellings of Classical Epic (Brill, 2018), p. 31. They are:
, quoted by Nonius Marcellus , quoted by Priscian
According to Reinhold Glei, commenting on the quality of the poetry, "the loss of the poem is perhaps not a very painful one".
See also Ninnia gens
References