CINNA, GAIUS HELVIUS, Roman poet of the later Ciceronian age, the friend of Catullus, whom he accompanied to Bithynia in the suite of the praetor Memmius. Suetonius, Valerius Maximus, Appian and Dio Cassius all state that, at Caesar's funeral, a certain Helvius Cinna was killed by mistake for Cor nelius Cinna, the conspirator. The last three writers mentioned above add that he was a tribune of the people, while Plutarch states that the Cinna who was killed by the mob was a poet. This points to the identity of Helvius Cinna the tribune with Helvius Cinna the poet. The chief objection to this view is based upon two lines in gth eclogue of Virgil, supposed to have been written 41 or 40 B.c., which seem to imply that Helvius Cinna was then alive. But such an interpretation of the passage is not absolutely necessary. Cinna's chief work was a mythological epic poem called Smyrna. A Propempticon Pollionis, a send-off to [Asinius] Pollio, is also attributed to him. In both these poems, the language of which was so obscure that they required special commentaries, his model appears to have been Parthenius of Nicaea.
See A. Weichert, Poetarum Latinorum Vitae (1830) ; L. edition of Catullus (187o) , where the remains of Cinna's poems are printed; A. Kiessling, "De C. Helvio Cinna Poeta" in Commentationes Philologicae in honorem T. Mommsen (1878) ; 0. Ribbeck, Geschichte der romischen Dichtung, i. (1887) ; Teuffel-Schwabe, Hist. of Roman Lit. (Eng. tr. 213, 2-5) ; Plessis, Poesie latine (1909).