Let’s begin with some background. The first two of the projected four-volume series Tragicorum Romanorum Fragmenta (TrRF) appeared in 2012. Volume I, edited by Markus Schauer, is an omnibus edition of wide range and great utility.[1] In addition to the testimonia and fragments of Livius Andronicus and Naevius, it includes testimonia about the genre itself from the earliest mentions of tragedy in Plautus’ Amphitruo to the increasingly garbled accounts of late antiquity, together with the remains of Roman poets and dabblers in tragic poetry grouped together as Tragici Minores, an inevitably mixed bag of unassigned fragments (Fragmenta Adespota), and an admirable variety of supporting material offering not just indices and bibliographies but immensely helpful metrical summaries and word lists (Subsidia). The aim throughout is to make available the greatest amount of evidence with the least amount of interpretation, meticulous attention to the vagaries of transmission and resistance to the reconstruction of lost plays being the most obvious consequences of that aim. The result, however uncompromising in its complexity, is in all respects a noteworthy advance over Otto Ribbeck’s long standard but increasingly outdated edition of the Latin dramatic fragments and significantly more authoritative than the more user-friendly Loeb edition of E. H. Warmington.[2]
The second volume, edited by Gesine Manuwald, is dedicated to Ennius.[3] Though the format remains the same, its relation to its predecessors is a little different because the state of knowledge is itself different. Harry Jocelyn’s Cambridge Orange edition of the fragments, already over half a century old, remains something of a landmark, innovative in its emphasis on the preserving contexts, astute in its philological judgments, and genuinely interested in and informative about the genre and its literary contexts.[4] It is, however, also incomplete (sixty-five unplaced fragments are included without commentary) and ungainly in its presentation. And, of course, the study of Ennius himself has itself advanced considerably on all fronts since the 1960s. TrRF clearly supersedes Jocelyn (as well as Ribbeck and Warmington) as the authoritative text for citing Ennius’ tragedies, but even so, it is less a replacement than a major contribution to an ongoing scholarly endeavor.
As we come now to the third volume in the series, the situation is different in still another way, since Petra Schierl provided the fragments of Pacuvius with a full and judicious edition and commentary in 2006.[5] Her adaptation of that work here to meet the demands of TrRF highlights some of the more awkward consequences of the series’ editorial values and conventions.[6] Noticeable, though not especially troublesome, is the clutter produced by the requirement to record even minor, largely insignificant textual differences, such as when the MS tradition of a transmitting author varies between Oscan Pacuius and Latin Pacuvius or between the Republican genitive Pacuvi and Classical Pacuvii. TrRF also requires the printed text to indicate editorial {deletions}, <additions>, and changed letters that are also reported in the apparatus. Thus, where Schierl 2006 prints “gnate, ordinem omnem, ut dederit <se>, enoda patri” (fr. 226: “erkläre, Sohn, den ganzen Ablauf (sc. des Geschehens), wie er sich ereignet hat, dem Vater!”) with an eight-line apparatus, the text in TrRF appears as “gnate, ordinem omnem, ut dederit <se>, enoda{t} patri” (F 177) followed by thirty-six lines of textual notes spread over three apparatus recording separately the variations found in manuscripts, in editions, and in the secondary literature.[7] Fussy to be sure, but not as frustrating as two features almost guaranteed to make life more difficult for users.
First is the presentation of Testimonia on the author’s life and career. Schierl 2006 collects thirty-seven such witnesses helpfully organized in three groups: De vita, in a logical order of biographical detail, De operibus, subdivided into plays, the (problematic) saturae attributed to Pacuvius, and an epitaph preserved by Gellius, and De iudicis apud posteros arranged in chronological order, where the order itself tells a story of reception. TrRF casts a wider net, gathering every mention of Pacuvius from the mid-Republic to the fifteenth-century scholar Antonius Volscus. There are fifty-three of these, but printed now in chronological order by source, which sets their information essentially at random.[8] A brief introduction offers some guidance, e.g. “vita et mores: T 1, 2, 13, 35, 42, 44, 45, 48, 49,” but that still means quite a lot of page-flipping. A second awkwardness follows from this. Though the entry for each play includes possible sources for Pacuvius’ plot, the fragments themselves, reflecting TrRF’s resistance to speculative scholarship, are also arranged in chronological order by the citing author rather than by their possible position in the play. That is not itself a problem, but there is more. TrRF enforces rigorous distinction among fragments cited by author and title, by author or title, and those lacking any attribution. The result? Schierl 2006 prints together under Chryses a set of fragments with what appears to be related philosophical content (fr. 78–81). TrRF cannot. Schierl’s fragment 78, introduced by Nonius as Pacuvius Chryse, duly appears here as F 63, but because Cicero and Varro introduce fr. 79 simply as Pacuvius, it is relegated to the back of the volume as F 229 Ex incertis fabulis, while fr. 76, introduced by Cicero only as in Chryse, and fr. 69, which he quotes without any identification, become Adespota 1 and 48 respectively, which a user will require TrRF Volume 1 to locate. There are, to be fair, clear, accurate, and ample cross-references provided to point users in the appropriate directions, but there are many such directions, which makes any coherent picture of the evidence and its possibilities difficult to assemble.
So conservative an approach nevertheless has significant virtues. TrRF’s editors are honest brokers providing a wealth of information in a format that, for all its complexity, is clear and unbiased in its reporting. The series’ resistance to the reconstructive impulse, whether of individual verses, of plots, or of biography, is also in line with current thinking as we grow increasingly wary of speculative reconstructions. As a result, the very features that make this volume, like all those in the series, difficult to read make it richly rewarding to consult. It is full of answers: a bibliography as current and inclusive as humanly possible, a full story of survival together with evidence for the how and why of that survival, and a complete record of textual variations and scholarly conjectures. The challenge lies in coming to it with appropriate questions, of which there are many.
Not all of these fix narrowly on tragedy, for the long-lived Pacuvius occupies a strategic place in Roman literary history more broadly conceived. He was about ninety, says Jerome, at his death in 130 BCE, which suggests a career that began within the floruit of Plautus and extended through and then beyond the time of Terence.[9] This was by any reckoning a period of significant cultural change, though the fact of literary change is more readily observed than explained. In the case of palliata comedy, for example, Terence’s marked shift toward the aesthetic values of his ostensible Greek models might be taken as a response to the accelerated flow of Greek wealth and Greek learning to Rome that followed Aemilius Paullus’ victory over Macedonia in 168. That claim is hard to document directly, but Pacuvius’ career may offer corroborating evidence. Like Terence, Pacuvius appears to have had some association with Aemilius Paullus, the connection suggested in his case by four lines of a praetexta play entitled Paulus that likely celebrated the victory at Pynda.[10] Even more suggestive are intriguing correspondences between the two dramatists’ styles of playwriting, though the late grammarian Fulgentius’ citation of (a?) Pacuvius as a writer of comedy is, to say the least, highly dubious.[11] The fragments show that Pacuvius, like his uncle Ennius, was a very deliberate stylist, stretching linguistic conventions to create for tragedy a generic analogue to what Terence, another self-conscious stylist, proudly called pura oratio, and that Pacuvius chose for his subjects myths dealing with family relations, identity and recognition, the tragic equivalent of familiar New Comedy themes. Pacuvius’ plot construction also recalls Terentian techniques, combining characters from different myths (a kind of contaminatio) and introducing a second hero to produce something like the duplex comoedia. How far to press such correspondences remains unclear, but exploring how or if or to what extent the same cultural forces shaped the development of tragedy and comedy in the second century would doubtless be worth the effort.
Such questions, along with so many others waiting in the wings, inevitably take us deep into a literary record that is largely fragmentary and require wrestling with the many technical difficulties that fragmentation presents. Doing so has never been easy, but by marshalling so much of the necessary evidence in a format both accessible and reliable, TrRF has made the task much more inviting and the likelihood of progress much more likely. That itself represents a significant advance, but as so often with fundamental tools, the full extent of TrRF’s achievement will ultimately be revealed by the achievement of its users.
Notes
[1] M. Schauer, Tragicorum Romanorum Fragmenta, Vol. 1: Livius Andronicus; Naevius; Tragici minores; Fragmenta adespota. (Göttingen 2012). Reviewed at BMCR 2013.02.12 (Goldberg). The final volume has also now appeared: J. Schultheiß, Tragicorum Romanorum Fragmenta. Vol. IV: Accius. (Göttingen 2023).
[2] O. Ribbeck, Scaenicae Romanorum poesis fragmenta, 2 vols. in three editions from 1852–1898, 2nd ed. reprinted Hildesheim 1962. E.H. Warmington, Remains of Old Latin, vol. 2. Loeb Classical Library 314. (Cambridge, MA 1967).
[3] G. Manuwald, Tragicorum Romanorum Fragmenta. Vol. II: Ennius. (Göttingen: 2012). Its text is reprinted with translation and notes in S. M. Goldberg and G. Manuwald, Fragmentary Republican Latin: Ennius. Dramatic Fragments. Minor Works. Loeb Classical Library 537. (Cambridge, MA 2018).
[4] H. D. Jocelyn, The Tragedies of Ennius. Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries. (Cambridge 1967).
[5] P. Schierl, Marcus Pacuvius, Die Tragödien des Pacuvius: ein Kommentar zu den Fragmenten mit Einleitung, Text und Übersetzung. (Berlin and New York 2006). Reviewed at BMCR 2008.04.31 (Gildenhard). A new edition of Pacuvius edited by Robert Maltby is in preparation for the Loeb series Fragmentary Republican Latin.
[6] These values and conventions remain consistent throughout the series, the general preface printed virtually unchanged from volume to volume and the same sample entry (Ennius F 18) used for each.
[7] The gloss in Nonius reads “enoda” significat explana (21-22L). Warmington, as often, prints a distinctly facilior lectio, “Gnato ordinem omnem, ut dederit se, enodat pater” (“The father to the son unknotted all || The sequence of events, how they occurred,” 329).
[8] The one notable exception is the epitaph accepted as authentic and thus given pride of place as T 1, although the source is Gell. 1.24.4. The other testimonia derived from Gell. are T 42–48.
[9] So T 48 TrRF. Cic. Brut. 229 (T 13) says Pacuvius was still producing plays at age 80. Plautus’ career is generally placed between ca. 205 and 184 BCE; the didascalic record sets Terence’s plays in the 160s. An alternative ancient tradition, since fallen from favor, set Pacuvius’ career a generation later. See J. Elliott, Early Latin Poetry (Leiden 2022) 72–76.
[10] A connection with Paullus, the consul of 216 who died at Cannae, seems much less likely. See G. Manuwald, Fabulae praetextae (Munich 2001) 180–96; Schierl 2006: 515–28; TrRF, pp. 322–26. Terence’s Hecyra and Adelphoe were produced at Paullus’ funeral games in 160.
[11] T 50 TrRF, with Schierl 2006: 10. Enough remains of Pacuvius, however, to justify at least this level of knowledge of his plays. See E. Fantham, “Pacuvius: Melodrama, Reversals and Recognitions,” in D. Braund and C. Gill, eds. Myth, History and Culture in Republican Rome (Exeter 2003) 98–118; G. Manuwald, Pacuvius, summus tragicus poeta: zum dramatischen Profil seiner Tragödien. (Munich 2003) 42–127; Schierl 2006: 17–34.