Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

DRAMA
Night or The Comedy of Errors. One must, however, wonder about the feasibility
of an unmasked Trigemird (pseudo-Plautus) or Quadrigemiru (Naevius).
Another sign of the influence of the Greek acting profession on the Roman
is that the Romans adopted and characteristically adapted the idea of a 'Guild'.
A decree of the Senate passed in Z07 B.C. permitted actors and scribae 'writers',
meaning playwrights and notaries, to belong to a conventicle which, like the
Artists' organization, was nominally religious. 1 Actors and writers might meet
(consistere ~ OUVOSEUEIV) and make offerings (dona ponere ~ Scopa &VCCTI6EVOCI)
in the temple of Minerva on the Aventine, in honour of Livius Andronicus, not
as poeta, 'maker', because of his plays or his Odyssey, but because as uates,
'bard', he could be represented as having appeased Juno's anger by the composition
and successful performance of a carmen, 'spell', for an expiatory rite.
Luckily for Andronicus this took place not long before the Roman victory
over the Cardiaginians at the Metaurus. Roman actors and writers thus avoided
association with Dionysus/Bacchus, whose cult was private and increasingly
disreputable, and were associated with Minerva/Athene, the general goddess of
the artes/rtyyai 'skills'; but since none of the festivals was in her special
honour, the association was superficial and the secularization of the profession
all but complete. Roman theatre-folk — actors, writers, and all — seem to have
been known as artifices scaenici ' scenic artists', a partial loan-translation of the
Greek appellation "rexvrrn,s AiovOcrou. The association with Minerva was
therefore to the logical Roman mind an obvious one.
It is unclear how this 'Athenaeum' on the Aventine related to the more
successful 'Museum*, the Templum Herculis Musarum founded in the 180s and
associated with Ennius. Nor is the position of the collegium poetarum, the
college of poets, fully clear. This body later at least met in the Templum
Herculis Musarum, and is first mentioned as such in an anecdote set c. 90 B.C.
(Val. Max. 3.7.11). By Terence's time there existed some formal procedure at
the scrutiny and sale of plays by which hostile parties might be present and
raise objections to another's offering on technical grounds (Ter. Eun. i Koivdv aOT&6gA