Reading roman tragedy

Abstract

Brutus the Liberator paid dearly for his success. Fear of a Tarquin resurgence led him to force his consular colleague Collatinus into exile, to preside over the public execution of his own sons, and to share a ferocious death in single combat with Arruns, the Tarquin heir. Livy made history of this story (2.1-6), but it could easily have become the tragedy of a man trapped in an ideology of his own making, who discovers only through a series of increasingly painful choices what it really means to be "Brutus." Euripides wrote such a play about Agamemnon (Iphigeneia at Aulis), but there was never a comparable play at Rome about Brutus. Though Romans celebrated his expulsion of the Tarquins on the stage as well as in their histories, no dramatist explored the moral ambiguities of his ensuing consulship. The price humans pay for greatness was not a Roman preoccupation: their literature shows little evidence of what we would call a tragic sensibility.' Yet the Romans had plays they called tragedies, and Roman tragedies enjoyed a considerable following. The many Plautine jokes and parodies at tragedy's expense confirm its ubiquity at the festivals.2 In Cicero's day, connoisseurs could recognize famous tragic arias by their opening notes, and whole audiences wept for Pacuvius' Deiphilus and rose to applaud the nobility of his Orestes. Tragedies in Latin were also taught in schools and read in studies, adding to the "cultural capital" of the elite and enriching the poetry of subsequent generations.3