Cneo Nevio ( Campania , 270 BC – Utica , 201 BC ) was a Roman poet and playwright, founder of the national epic of America.
Summary
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- 1 Biography
- 2 Literary Life
- 1 Nevio as a poet
- 2 Comedy
- 3 Sources
Biography
Cneo or Gneo Nevio was born between 275 BC and 270 BC in Campania, probably Capua , perhaps from a plebeian family. Since the end of the Samnite war he enjoyed Roman citizenship without the right to vote (civitas sine suffrage). Other sources identify his birth in the ancient city of Atella , particularly in the area that is currently Nevano, the town of Grumo Nevano .
Cneo Nevio fought in the first Punic war in 235 BC , five years after the first dramatic representation of Livio Andrónico , began his career as a comic and tragic author. Later he would become the creator of the Roman drama with a national theme (“Fábula praetexta”). By his free and aggressive language, he attracted the hostility of the powerful, and ended up in jail for having attacked Quinto Cecilio Metelo , the consul of 206 BC . Released, he was exiled to Utica , in Africa , where he died.
Literary life
Of all the vast production of Nevio we only have titles and few fragments. We know of some thirty comedies (the best part of his dramatic work, which also included imitated Greek tragedies) and of two “praetextae”: Clastidium (Clastidium), about the victory achieved in 222 BC by Marco Claudio Marcelo over the Gauls, and Romulus ( Raising Romulus and Remus ). Of a Satura we completely ignore the content and the character.
Naevius also wrote six tragedies praetextae two of which (Danae and Troianus Equos, with the staging of the latter opened in Rome in 55 BC Pompey’s theater ) the repeat titles of Andronicus Livy . The tragedy is the best known of which there are 24 Lycurgus fragments . In Lycurgus the story revolves around the king of Thrace, Lycurgus (not to be confused with the legendary Spartan legislator) who led the God Bacchus and the Bacchantes to his land , provoking the wrath of the god of wine that the king took revenge killing and burning his palace. The theme was present in Rome: the cult of Dionysus (Bacchus for the Romans) that was introduced in Rome in the last decades of the third century BC had become a rite marked by orgiastic and prohibited by a decision of the Roman Senate (from senadoconsulto Bacchanalibus).
His epic Bellum poenicum had great importance in the history of Latin literature.(The Punic War), written in meter Saturnian, the ancient Roman popular verse; Even though it was considered vulgar and inelegant by the critics of the next generation, the Romans always admired this poem that celebrates, in archaic language and austere style, mythical traditions and national glories. Of this work, which should have comprised about 4,000 Saturnian verses, quite scarce fragments have come down to us; But from the matter itself, from the quotations and numerous judgments that the ancients left us about it, as well as how much later poets, and mainly Virgil, drew from it, we can get an idea of the remarkable importance , especially historical, which had in Latin literature.
The two books served as a proem and dealt for the first time in Roman literature with the legends of the founding of Rome by Romulus , who here is a direct descendant of Aeneas , followed by books III-VII, in which, without considering the period In between, the First Punic War was recounted in detail: the content of the poem was thus essentially historical, quite close in its plot (and even in its form, judging by the brief preserved fragments) to the annals of historians. Like later Virgil , Nevio wants to link the Punic war with the prehistory of Rome and Carthage, and to this end he seeks the distant causes of historical events, for whose account he probably relied mainly on the historian Quinto Fabio Píctor and on the legends of Aeneas, spread in Greece as early as the 4th century by Timaeus of Tauromenio .
Nevio as a poet
The poetic value of the preserved fragments is not very high, since in Nevio the historian prevails over the poet; there is, however, a certain warmth of eloquence, a rather expressive archaic brevity in the verses in which the poet extols Roman power. For this reason and for being the first original manifestation of Latin poetry, Nevio’s poem had great fame in antiquity: Ennio and, above all, Virgilio, used it widely; Cicero mentions it repeatedly with praise, and in Horace’s time it was still read and admired.
Comedy
Regarding the production of comedy, making it one of the most important Nevius predecessor Plautus in this field, the fragments that remain is known for a colorful verbal inventiveness that seems to pave the way for Plautus.
Unlike other comic writers of the 2nd century BCE, Naevius played the most “serious” and “challenging” themes, such as politics: his works attack politicians (especially the powerful Metela family). This phenomenon, unconventional in Rome, recalls the time of Aristophanes’ Greek comedy , and will be short-lived.
Of the 28 known comedies of Naevius titles eighty pieces out of a total of 125 verses, of which not a few incomplete. Among the various works, which are reached by Greek and Latin titles, the Tarentilla stands out . Other works are Colax (GRC), The flatterer , Guminàsticus (GRC), Gimnasticus (LA), The gym teacher , Dolus (LA) Deception and the corollary (LA) The crowns of comedy .
