Appended to Ovid's works are several graceful poems which have put forward a claim to be his workmanship. His great popularity among the schools of the rhetoricians both in Rome and the provinces, caused many imitations to be circulated under his name. The most ancient of these is the _Nux elegia_, which, if not Ovid's, must be very shortly posterior to him; it is the complaint of a walnut tree on the harsh treatment it has to suffer, sometimes in very difficult verse, [54] but not inelegant. Some of the _Priapeia_ are also attributed to him, perhaps with reason; the _Consolatio ad Liviam_, on the death of Drusus, is a clever production of the Renaissance period, full of reminiscences of Ovid's verse, much as the _Ciris_ is filled with reminiscences of Virgil. [55] Ovid was the most brilliant figure in a gay circle of erotic and epic poets, many of whom he has handed down in his _Epistles_, others have transmitted a few fragments by which we can estimate their power. The eldest was PONTICUS, who is also mentioned by Propertius as an epic writer of some pretensions. Another was MACER, whose ambition led him to group together the epic legends antecedent and subsequent to those narrated in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. There was a Pompeius Macer, an excellent man, who with his son committed suicide under Tiberius, [56] his daughter having been accused of high treason, and unable to clear herself. The son is probably identical with this friend of Ovid's. SABINUS, another of his intimates, who wrote answers to the _Heroides_, was equally conspicuous in heroic poetry. The title of his poem is not known. Some think it was _Troezen_; [57] but the text is corrupt. Ovid implies [58] that his rescripts to the _Heroides_ were complete; it is a misfortune that we have lost them. The three poems that bear the title of _A. Sabini Epistolae_, and are often bound with Ovid's works, are the production of an Italian scholar of the fifteenth century. TUTICANUS, who was born in the same year with Ovid, and may perhaps have been the author of Tibullus's third book, is included in the last epistle from Pontus [59] among epic bards. CORNELIUS SEVERUS, a better versifier than poet, [60] wrote a _Sicilian War_, [61] of which the first book was extremely good. In it occurred the verses on the death of Cicero, quoted by the elder Seneca [62] with approbation: