The Fall and Rise of Roman Tragedy

The history of Roman tragedy rests on a paradox. Not a single play performed publicly at Rome survives intact, while those that have survived-the ten plays of the Senecan corpus-lack all traces of production history. Thus, though we know that Varius' lost Thyestes was performed to public acclaim in the early 20s B.C.E. and went on to win literary renown, the when, why, where, and how of Seneca's extant Thyestes are beyond recall. Yet the fact remains that tragedy at Rome survived the loss of professional playwrights and the stultifying extravagances of the Republican stage to reemerge under the Principate as a favorite and even a potent genre for Roman aristocrats with a literary turn. How this came about, how tragedy developed between the death of Accius at some point in the 90s B.C.E. and the death of Domitian nearly two centuries later, merits attention both for the story's inherent interest and, in a larger sense, for what it reveals of the forces at work on literature in that seminal period from Republic to empire.