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

THE ORIGINS OF ROMAN DRAMA
story in which he confuses first-century B.C. forms of that unmasked entertainment
"with the presentation of Andronicus' drama: according to him, Andronicus
acted and sang in his own productions, but one day, straining his voice, passed
his singing part over to a convenient puer, while he himself mimed the appropriate
actions.
Etruscan dancers, Atellane farce, tibicines, mime, and Fescennine exchanges
are relevant in various ways to Roman drama as we know it, but it is striking
that this source and others seem determined to mention nothing Greek in
connexion with early Roman drama. Yet the long-established prose- and
verse-comedies of Sicily, the vigorous Doric verse-comedies of South Italy,
and the farces of Rhinthon (pA/yakes, hilarotragoediae), not to mention the
repertoire of the Artists, must have had direct and important influences. Roman
drama was an adaptation of Hellenic drama. Why was it adopted at Rome so
fruitfully in the middle of the third century B.C., rather than much sooner or
much later?
It would be a mistake to oppose Greek and Italian elements in the implicitly
chauvinistic manner of the sources reviewed above. Nor is it enough to acknowledge
the importance of the theatrical traditions of South Italy and Sicily. To
answer the question posed, one must look at Italy in its Hellenistic setting. The
Roman people had no hermetic or racial self-consciousness. Their foundationmyths
showed that they were a mixed people and their unusual law of manumission
made freed slaves members of the body politic, so that potentially
anyone of any race might be a ciuis Romanus. They were open to Greek influences
in all spheres, and their political and military contacts with the Greeks
of Epirus, South Italy, and Sicily, in particular, the war against Pyrrhus and the
First Punic War, came at a time when Greeks, for their part, were ceasing to
think of' Hellenism' as racially exclusive. As we have seen, it was at just this
time that a particularly vivid expression of Hellenism, the Attic drama, was
being disseminated more widely than ever before. Under Eratosthenes, the
second generation of scholars at the Alexandrian Library were directing their
attention outside the Greek world as traditionally defined, and were translating
into Greek law-codes, technical manuals, and records in other languages. The
most famous of these is the version of the Hebrew Pentateuch which lies behind
the Septuagint. 1 It is a striking accident, if it is only an accident, that Andronicus
and Naevius should have embarked in this very generation on what is in a sense
the counterpart of this activity at Alexandria. Theirs, however, was the more
ambitious and difficult task. The works to which the Alexandrians directed
their attention were factual; the contents mattered, not the style. The merely
factual content of the Odyssey, which Andronicus ' translated', or of an Attic
play is less important than its presentation: the form and style of a literary
1 Jellicoe (1968) 47-58; Pfeiffer (1968) 152—70; Fraser (1972) 305—35.
79
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008