Dracontius
A Latin poet who lived and practised as an advocate at Carthage towards the end of the fifth century A.D. He was a man of real poetic gifts and considerable reading, but his style is spoiled by rhetorical exaggeration and false taste. His surviving works are: (1) A number of short epics upon subjects taken from the old mythology and school-room rhetoric (e. g. Hylas, Raptus Helenae, Deliberativa Achillis, etc.).
(2) An apologetic poem (Satisfactio) addressed in the form of an elegy to Gunthamund, king of the Vandals (A.D. 484-496), whose wrath he had excited by writing a panegyric on a foreign prince.
(3) A Christian didactic poem (De Laudibus Dei or Hexaëmeron) in three books. This is a fairly poetical treatment of the story of the Creation.
(4) Two epithalamia in hexameters. composed in early youth.
(5) Several distichs De Origine Rosarum and De Mensibus. He is probably the author, also, of 971 hexameters, entitled Orestis Tragoedia, attributed during the Middle Ages to Horace or Lucan. The editio princeps of the complete works of Dracontius is that of Arevalo (Rome, 1791). Earlier editions give only the Satisfactio and the Hexaëmeron. The minor poems of Dracontius have been edited by Duhn (Leipzig, 1873). Editions of the Orestis Tragoedia are those of Mähly (Leipzig, 1866) and Schenkl (Prague, 1867). See, also, Rossberg, De Dracontio (Göttingen, 1880).