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THE ORIGINS OF ROMAN DRAMA
and who were its audience? The origin of the Roman brand of iambo-trochaic
verse remains a mystery, but whoever did invent the form, and in particular the principles
respecting word-accent and prosody, was a genius; for analogous principles
were naturally followed in all other forms of quantitative verse borrowed from the
Greeks. Perhaps we might understand the matter better if more were known of the
Saturnian verse (see p. 57) and if we could trust Livy's allusion to a pre-dramatic
'satura' (see pp. 160—2).
2. LIGHT DRAMA
Andronicus and Naevius
Volcacius Sedigitus did not even mention Andronicus in his list of the ten
best (i.e. funniest) comic poets, but gave Naevius third place after Caecilius
and Plautus, reversing their chronological order. Cicero did not think
Andronicus' plays worth a second reading, and it was his fate even more in
comedy than in tragedy to suffer invidious comparisons with his successors.
Plautus was later supposed to have borrowed a good deal from Andronicus
and there was a tradition that at Eun. 426 Terence was satirically quoting a line
of Andronicus, lepus tute es: pulpamentum quaeris? 'You are a hare: are you
looking for tasty meat?' 1 This has been compared with a favourite Plautine
form of expression in which riddles (not, however, epigrams like this) are
posed with a more or less bizarre identification followed by an explanation
with no connecting or causal conjunction; e.g. Pseud. 747 "What when he's
caught red-handed?' anguillast: elabitur 'He's an eel: he slips away'; Mer. 361
musca est meuspater: nilpotest eum clam haberi 'My father is a fly: you can't
keep anything private from him.' 2 The influence of Naevius on Plautus is very
evident from the titles and the style of the fragments. If one early dramatist
deserves the credit for establishing the form and stabilizing the diction of
Roman comedy, it is he. 3 There is some suggestion that Plautus worked with
him or revised some of his scripts. 4 Titles such as Lampadio, Stalagmus,
Stigmatias, Technicus denote leading slaves; the titles of New Comedy very
rarely denote a slave, and hardly ever name him. It seems that Naevius, not
Plautus, was responsible for the promotion in Roman comedy of the clever
slave. On the other hand plays called Testicularia, Apella, Triphallus\Tribacelus
imply a more bawdy approach than we find either in New Comedy or Plautus.
Naevius freely renamed the plays which he adapted, and added material involving
Italian allusions or dramatic ideas suggested more or less specifically by
other Greek plays. Plautus followed Naevius in these points and we may draw
« Wright (1974) *4-7-
1 Fraenkel (i960) 35ff.
3 Wright (1974) 33-85.
4 Carbonaria, Coiax, Fretum, Nervolaria are titles rightly or -wTongly assigned to both; cf. Ter.
Eun. 25.
93
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