Changing Fashions in Ancient Drama–II

Extract

This, then, was the state of the theatre when the Romans first came into direct contact with the Greeks in the middle of the third century: revivals of fifth-century melodramas and romantic tragedies, especially those of Euripides, and revivals of the New Comedy of the late fourth and early third centuries, especially the plays of Menander, held the stage. The Romans themselves had nothing quite like this in their own popular entertainment. They had stage-shows of a sort, of course. Their own native form of entertainment was the satura, which seems to have been some sort of variety show; and they had imported Etruscan ludi, consisting mainly of music and dancing, and the Campanian Atellane farce, which was something rather similar to a harlequinade. The Greek theatre, which at this period was outwardly more splendid than ever before, was to the Romans an impressive and fascinating novelty; and, when Livius Andronicus in 240 B.c. translated a Greek tragedy and a Greek comedy for the Roman stage, he achieved an immediate success and started a vogue for drama in the Greek style at Rome which ousted the old satura from the stage. It is sometimes regarded as a reflection on Roman taste that the Roman theatre in the third and second centuries B.c. should have concentrated on Euripidean melodrama and Menandrean New Comedy to the exclusion of the greater works of the fifth-century Greek dramatists. But this is an unjustified conclusion. The choice of models represents not the taste of the Romans—for in fact Greek-style drama failed to achieve lasting popularity at Rome—but that of the contemporary Greek theatre, which was the only guide that the Romans had at that date. At this period Rome imitated the literature which was currently fashionable in the Greek world. It was not until the time of Catullus and the ‘learned’ poets that the Romans, following the lead of the Alexandrine scholars, made a systematic study of Greek literature. It was only then that the Romans made the acquaintance of those works which had become the province of the scholar, and so were able to draw upon the whole range of Greek literature for their models. The inspiration derived from studying Greek poetry of the finest periods was to lead to great developments in lyric and elegy and in pastoral and didactic poetry, but it came too late for drama, which was by that time fast disappearing from the Roman theatre.