Four Tragedies and Octavia Read Free Page B

were, so far as we know, no public opportunities for such performances. What we do know of the nearest approach to tragic acting in Nero’s time suggests something between ballet and opera, with the emphasis on the individual virtuoso’s art of evoking, in song and mime,the passions and torments of a Hercules or an Oedipus – an art of which Nero fancied himself both as connoisseur and exponent. Of what passed for dramatic performance some glimpse can be gathered from scattered references such as this from Suetonius: 1
    He gave an immense variety of entertainments – coming-of-age parties, chariot races in the Circus, stage plays…. At the Great Festival, as he called the series of plays devoted to the hope of his reigning for ever, parts were taken by men and women of both Orders; and one well-known knight rode an elephant down a sloping tight-rope. When he staged ‘The Fire’, a Roman play by Afranius, the actors were allowed to keep the valuable furnishings they rescued from the burning house…. In the ‘Daedalus and Icarus’ ballet, the actor who played Icarus, while attempting his first flight, fell beside Nero’s couch and spattered him with blood….
    A generally lively programme, with amateur enthusiasm contributing, and plenty of realistic, preferably dangerous, and often unseemly, action. Even a hundred years earlier Cicero, at the festival celebrating the opening of Rome’s first permanent theatre, complained 2 of the pathetic performances of old-fashioned actors past their prime, and of the spectacular ostentation which had been imposed upon the old tragedies: ‘Who wants to see six hundred mules in
Clytaemnestra
or three hundred goblets in
The Trojan Horse
, or a battle between fully equipped armies of horse and foot?’ A rhetorical exaggeration, no doubt, but an indication of the way things were going. Even so, a tradition persisted for the composition of tragedy on the Greek pattern, and if such works made little impression on public audiences they were regarded as worthy employment for the pens of erudite authors or even of men of business intheir spare time. Knowing little or nothing of the public fate of most of these works, we do at least know that Cicero himself, and his brother Quintus, wrote tragedies; Julius Caesar wrote one,
Oedipus
; Ovid’s
Medea
was esteemed as highly as any of the varied works for which he has become known to posterity; and there is record of a performance of a tragedy
Thyestes
, by L. Varius Rufus, at the festival in celebration of the victory of Actium. To have a play performed, for some special occasion, was an accident that none of such authors counted on, or particularly desired – if they were of the same mind as Ovid, who writes from exile: 1 ‘You tell me that my poetry is being performed to full houses and winning much applause; as far as I am concerned, I never wrote with the theatre in mind, as you very well know, and my Muse was always indifferent to applause.’
    Nor did Seneca, we may be quite sure, have anything like public performance in mind when he wrote his adaptations of Greek tragedies. To appreciate the purpose and achievement of this rather curious branch of Latin literature, so far as we can from the isolated group of specimens available to us, we must first remember that Roman drama, such as it was, grew up in social and artistic conditions far different from those which produced the drama of Athens. The practical, busy cosmopolitanism of the rising republic took kindly to the comic legacy of the declining Greek theatre, but, though tragedies were translated and imitated from the same period onwards, the diffuse Roman society and the increasingly sophisticated Roman mind could never recapture the singleness of spirit which in a Greek city-state found expression in the ritual of tragedy. In its comparatively short season of flowering, Greek tragedy itself had moved from the religious