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

MINOR FIGURES
Sabinus may have written an epic on the city of Troesmes: that depends on an
emendation of Ov. Pont. 4.16.13. Numa and Priscus are mere names, perhaps
epicists. This leaves us with Ovid's friend Macer, a poet of the Trojan cycle.
At Am. 2.18, he is said to have dealt with material prior to the Trojan "War; and
Pont. 2.10.13 could perhaps be pressed to yield a Posthomerica. Sparse though
the evidence may be, it is at least clear that the oldest form of poetry lost none
of its attractions, despite the Roman adoption of Callimachean theory, with
its many reservations about full scale epic.
Tragedy did not fare quite so well, but we do know of seven or eight writers
who handled the genre — Varius, Gracchus, Pupius, Turranius and Ovid, as
well as Pollio, and the princeps himself. Varius' Thyestes, produced in 29 B.C.,
survives in one alliterative, rather precious fragment:
iam fero infandissima
iam facere cogor.
Now my lot is unspeakable; now I must do unspeakable things.
Gracchus, mentioned at Ov. Pont. 4.16.31, seems to have treated the same myth.
We have one line of his Thyestes:
mersit sequentis umidum plantis humum
the soft ground hid the tracks of the pursuer,
as well as a grandiose snatch from his Atalanta:
sonat impulsu regia cardo
the regal door sounded beneath the shock.
He also wrote a Peliades, of which a dimeter survives. Pupius and Turranius
are just names, and Ovid's famous Medea, a work of his middle period, is only
known in two lines, cited by Quintilian and Seneca. Pollio is a greater loss:
we do not have much more than the tributes from Virgil and Horace, and the
criticism of Tacitus. We cannot specify in what way his tragedies were
'modern' —as Virgil implies, perhaps with metre in mind 1 — but he was
undeniably an important figure for the earlier group of Augustan poets,
a survivor from the late Republic, who knew Catullus, Calvus, and Cinna.
Suetonius informs us of an Ajax by Augustus; but again, we have no fragments.
1
Pollio et ipse facit noua carmina, Eel. 3.86. Virgil may have regarded Pollio's use of the trimeter
(see Hor. Sat. 1.10.43, and cf. A.P. 251ft.) as an advance on senarii, but the epithet nouus still strikes
one as strange: perhaps we are too accustomed to associating 'New Poetry' with the type of composition
which Catullus and Calvus wrote. Certainly the grandiose image of the bull which prefaces
the allusion to Pollio's noua carmina seems to designate tragedy. If there is a connexion between the
present use oi nouus and the literary pretensions of the previous generation, then what we have here
is yet another instance of the increasingly loose interpretation of Callimachus' ideals; and perhaps it
is significant that Pollio knew Calvus, was mentioned by Catullus, and was the recipient of a propempticon
by Cinna.
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