Cicero, On Duties 1.61 (citing
Ennius), 1.7.21; Tusculan Disputations
Fragmentary Republican Latin; Volume II:
Ennius: Dramatic Fragments Minor Works
Later, Latin playwrights
Ennius, Pacuvius, Naevius, and Accius all wrote tragedies, now lost, that appear to have dramatized some aspect of the Orestes mythos.
Interestingly enough, Telamon was the titular character of the tragedy Telamo by Roman poet Quintus
Ennius (239-169 BCE), of which only a few fragments survive.
(47.) As Callebat (2004, 62) observes, Vitruvius here participates in a literary convention in which Latin authors, including
Ennius, Cicero, Virgil, and Ovid, expressed the desire and expectation to live on through their work.
Petrarch offers his services as scribe to the cause, as the poet to his prince, the
Ennius to his Scipio.
Who has such a hatred, one might almost say, for the very name of Roman, as to despise and reject the Medea of
Ennius or the Antiope of Pacuvius, and give as his reason that though he enjoys the corresponding plays of Euripides he cannot endure books written in Latin?" (5-7).
The availability of the Roman public to comedy, a genre contiguous with the full range of entertainment shows, naturalizes this theatrical species unlike the tragedy, for whose implementation took Rome a whole educational labor (the first Roman tragic authors, Andronicus, Naevius,
Ennius, Pacuvius, Atticus were scholars and translators of Greek tragedies and their attempts remained at the stage of adaptations).