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APPENDIX OF AUTHORS AND WORKS
36.36.5). Jerome unreliably puts A.'s floruit in 187 B.C. Other traces of this Accian
account of A.'s career in Porcius Licinus fr. 1 FPL p. 44 (arrival of the Muse at Rome
during Second Punic War), Hor. Epist. 2.1.162 (tragedy developed after Punic Wars),
Valerius Antias ap. Livy 36.36.5 (first ludi scaenici those of 191 B.C.; untrue), and in
failure of Volcacius Sedigitus to mention A. at all in his list of the best comic poets,
not even antiquitatis causa (fr. 3 FPL pp. 46f.).
(4) View of Varro, Atticus and Cicero. Cicero {Brut. 72) refutes Accius' view on
A.'s chronology by alleging that A. was the first to produce a play and did so in
240 B.C. the year before Ennius' birth (cf. Tusc. 1.1.3). For this he cites the authority of
Atticus (in his Liber artnalis), who was in turn following Varro in his De poetis (cf.
Gell. 17.21.42), and 'old commentarii' which Cicero himself had seen, presumably
documents like those which gave 204 B.C. as date of Naevius' death {Brut. 60). Status
of these documents is important but indeterminable: it would be sanguine to suppose
they were official contemporary records, but they must have been older than the
Gracchan era, because Cicero commends them as old in order to imply that their
authority was better than that of Accius. Other reflections of Varro's opinion in
Cassiodorus Chron. who speaks of a tragedy and comedy put on at the Roman Games
in 239, not 240 B.C., and the Glossae Salomonis (9—10th c, St Gall) 7 (CGF 1 Kaibel
p. 72; H. Usener, ' Vergessenes', Rh.M. 28 (1973) 418 = Kleine Schriften in (Berlin
1914) 37), tragoedias comoediasqiie primus egit idemque etiam composuit Liuius Andronicus
duplici toga infulatus, as well as in Gellius (loc. cit.: primus omnium L. Liuius
fabulas docere Romae coepit), and in the unreliable source used by Livy in his
account of the growth of Roman drama (7.2.46°., see p. 78), who in passing also
mentions A. as he qui ab saturis ausus est primus argumento fabulam serere. On Varro's
fondness forprimi inuentores see H. Dahlmann, Abh. Akad. Maiivr 1970, 94f. Under this
label it is easy to confuse 'earliest known' and 'ultimate originator', and it is not clear
what Varro meant, for if it was his claim that A. was the first to adapt Greek plays for
the Latin stage, or the earliest known, it is rather odd that none of the citations make
this explicit by using some such expression as uertit ex graeco. Evidently it -was not
being claimed that he invented the iambo-trochaic metres of dialogue and recitative
or the quantitative polymetry of cantica (to the performance of which, however, Livy
(loc. cit.) would have it that he made changes of presentation, see p. 79).
(5) Modern interpretation of chronology. Accius alone is our authority for the
Tarentine origin of A. and for his connexion with the Livii Salinatores in particular;
for Cicero Brut. 72 does not attribute belief in either of these points to Atticus, and
they appear nowhere in the remains of the Varronian account. As Cicero's sole
concern was to demonstrate what he believed to be a gross error on Accius' part as
regards chronology, his silence on these two points cannot be interpreted either as
affirming or denying the claims that A. was a Tarentine and a slave of the Salinatores.
Nevertheless scholars generally accept that A. did come from Tarentum and that
Accius has confused the assault on Tarentum in 272 B.C. with its capture in 209 B.C. In
this case A. would have been a slave of the grandfather of the Salinator whom Accius
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