Marullus, Michael (c. 1453–1500)

Italian soldier and humanist poet. He was born in Ancona but claimed to be of Byzantine descent. In the 1470s, he spent his time fighting the Turks; in late 1494, he was in the French army invading Italy, but in 1500 he fought against Cesare Borgia and his French troops. Between these bouts of bloody activity, Marullus wrote Epigrammata and Hymni naturales, which imitated the Roman poets Horace, Catullus, and Lucretius (to the extent that he sounded, Erasmus complained, ‘just like a pagan’).