Marcus Pacuvius (; 220 – ) was an ancient Rome tragic poet. He is regarded as the greatest of their tragedians prior to Lucius Accius.
Pacuvius obtained distinction also as a painter; and Pliny the Elder ( Naturalis Historia xxxv) mentions a work of his in the Temple of Hercules in the Forum Boarium. He was less productive as a poet than either Ennius or Accius; we hear of only twelve of his plays, founded on Greek subjects and most of them connected to the Trojan cycle ( Antiope, Armorum Judicium, Atalanta, Chryses, Dulorestes, Hermione, Iliona, Medus, Niptra, Pentheus, Periboea, and Teucer) and one praetexta ( Paullus) written in connection with the victory of Lucius Aemilius Paullus Macedonicus at the Battle of Pydna (168 BC), as the Clastidium of Naevius and the Ambracia of Ennius were written in commemoration of great military successes.
He continued to write tragedies till the age of eighty, when he exhibited a play in the same year as Accius, who was then thirty years of age. He retired to Taranto for the last years of his life, and a story is told by Aulus Gellius (xiii.2) of his being visited there by Accius on his way to Asia, who read his Atreus to him. The story is probably, like that of the visit of the young Terence to the veteran Caecilius Statius, due to the invention of later grammarians; but it is invented in accordance with the traditionary criticism (Horace, Epp. ii.1.5455) of the distinction between the two poets, the older being characterized rather by cultivated accomplishment ( doctus), the younger by vigour and animation ( altus).
Adulescens, tametsi properas, te hoc saxum rogat
Ut sese aspicias, deinde quod scriptum 'st legas
Hic sunt poetae Pacuvi Marci sita
ossa. Hoc volebam nescius ne esses. Vale."Young man, though you are in a hurry, this stone asks you
to look at it, then to read what is written.
Here are placed the poet Pacuvius Marcus's
bones. I wished you to know this. Farewell."
Among the passages quoted from Pacuvius are several which indicate a taste both for physical and ethical speculation, and others which expose the pretensions of religious imposture. These poets aided also in developing that capacity which the Roman language subsequently displayed of being an organ of oratory, history and moral disquisition. The literary language of Rome was in process of formation during the 2nd century BC, and it was in the latter part of this century that the series of great Roman orators, with whose spirit Roman tragedy has a strong affinity, begins. But the new creative effort in language was accompanied by considerable crudeness of execution, and the novel word-formations and varieties of inflexion introduced by Pacuvius exposed him to the ridicule of the satirist Gaius Lucilius, and, long afterwards, to that of his imitator Persius.
But, notwithstanding the attempt to introduce an alien element into the Roman language, which proved incompatible with its natural genius, and his own failure to attain the idiomatic purity of Naevius, Plautus, or Terence, the fragments of his dramas are sufficient to prove the service which he rendered to the formation of the literary language of Rome as well as to the culture and character of his contemporaries.
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