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‘Translated word-for-word’? Re-examining the relationship between Greek and Roman Republican tragedy

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Abstract

This paper provides an overview of some of the issues in reading and researching Roman Republican tragedy, in the light of how these fragmentary texts differ from Ancient Greek tragedies. Not a single Roman Republican tragedy is preserved for us in complete form. They survive to us in a disordered, lacunose, voiceless form, disconnected from the performance context which gave them meaning. And yet we can only ascribe these qualities to the fragments because we know that they once formed a complete play, with a continuous, meaningful text, ordered by a plot and performed a cast of characters embodied and voiced by actors in a theatre at one of Rome’s public festivals. But from the 19th century, serious attempts to restore some of these properties – their order, voicing and meaning in relation to the lost whole – began. Yet finding clues towards such reconstruction was complicated by the disjointedness between the fragments and their contexts. In this paper, examples from Ennius’ works are presented in order to investigate these issues.

How to Cite:

Payne, M., (2022) “‘Translated word-for-word’? Re-examining the relationship between Greek and Roman Republican tragedy”, Tetradio 31(1): 2, 33–42. doi: https://doi.org/10.21825/tetradio.91593