The Poet Cn. Naevius, P. Cornelius Scipio and Q. Caecilius Metellus

Abstract

It was many years after the last premiere of a Terentian comedy that the first attempts to write the history of Latin poetry appeared. Scholars had available little documentary material regarding the poets of the late third and early second centuries except the texts of poems, dates of performance of so-called carmina in priestly archives and of so-called fabulae in magisterial archives, and inscriptions on tombstones. These poets were without exception slaves or non-Roman clients of the great aristocratic families and their persons were not well regarded in the community at large. Neither the attitude to poetry of Roman society nor the example of Greek historiography permitted the chroniclers of Roman public life to take account of them. The poets who wrote for the theatre of fifth-century Athens came for the most part from well-regarded citizen families and practised an honoured craft. Although those of them who wrote comedies had much to say about Athenian public life and although their prejudices tended to correspond with his own the great Thucydides had ignored them. Their first biographers found themselves as badly off for contemporary documentary material as Roman writers were to be and yet by the exercise of judgement and fancy in interpreting the extant texts succeeded in constructing extensive narratives. The Roman writers took over Greek methods here as in other areas.