Gaius Asinius Pollio (75 BC – AD 4) was a Roman soldier, politician, orator, poet, playwright, literary critic, and historian, whose lost contemporaneous history provided much of the material used by the historians Appian and Plutarch. Pollio was most famously a patron of Virgil and a friend of Horace; poems to him were dedicated by both men.
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Early life
Asinius Pollio was born in Teate Marrucinorum, the modern Chieti in Abruzzi, central Italy. According to an inscription, his father was called Gnaeus Asinius Pollio. He had a brother named Asinius Marrucinus, whom Catullus calls out for his tasteless practical joke, whose name suggests a family origin among the Marrucini. Pollio may therefore have been the grandson of Herius Asinius, a plebeian and a general of the Marrucini who fought on the Italian side in the Social War.
Pollio moved in the literary circle of Catullus and entered public life in 56 BC by supporting Lentulus Spinther. In 54, he unsuccessfully attempted to impeach Gaius Porcius Cato (a distant relative of the more famous Cato the Younger). Gaius Porcius Cato had acted as the tool of the triumvirs Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar in his tribunate in 56 BC.