Livy and the theatre: Reflections on the theory of Peter Wiseman

Klio

Volumn 88, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 510-515

  Keaveney, Arthur ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 61249352788     PISSN: 00756334     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1524/klio.2006.88.2.510     Document Type: Review

References (17)

1. A. Keaveney, The tragedy of Caius Gracchus: ancient melodrama or modern farce?, Klio 85, 2003, 322-332. I was unaware that G. Manuwald, Fabulae Praetextae; Spuren einer literarischen Gattung der Römer, Munich 2001, 91-92, 127 a little while before had also expressed doubts.
2. J. L. Beness/J. W. Hillard, The Theatricality of the deaths of C. Gracchus and Friends, CQ 51, 2001, 135-140 attempt to bolster Wiseman's case for a drama often performed and reworked in its different productions by pointing both to the prominence of the theme of false and true friendships and to the minor variants in the sources as a whole as evidence for stage origin. Given the critical juncture in Gracchus' fortunes I do not think we need have recourse to the playhouse to account for acts of loyalty and betrayal. Variants in detail too can easily be accounted for if we remember they almost inevitably occur in accounts of street battles. Reports of the fall of the Bastille provide a convenient but hardly singular point of comparison.
3. See J. Godechot, The Taking of the Bastille, London 1970, 204-246, 277-326.
4. Finally, attention may be drawn to the useful remarks on Plutarch and the theatre in G. W. M. Harrison, Plutarch the Dramaturg: Statecraft as Stagecraft in the Lives, in: L. de Blois et al. (eds.), The Statesman in Plutarch's works, Leiden 2005, 53-60.
5. T. P. Wiseman, Historiography and Imagination, Exeter 1994, 18.
6. T. P. Wiseman, Roman Drama and Roman History, Exeter 1998, 2.
7. See also his Lying Historians: Seven types of mendacity, in: C. Gill/T. P. Wiseman (eds.), Des and Fiction in the ancient world, Exeter 1993, 134.
8. On Roman attitudes to the theatre see C. Edwards, The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome, Cambridge 1993, 98-136.
9. T. P. Wiseman, Ovid and the stage, in: G. Herbert-Brown, Ovid's Fasti, Oxford 2002, 299.
10. In Keaveney (n. 1) 322-323 I wondered if such ephemeral productions were capable of influencing our extant authors. Now another worry must be voiced. Reconstructions of these putative dramas by modern scholars are often very elaborate cf. e. g. Wright (n. 9) and T. P. Wiseman, The Games of Flora, in: B. Bergmann and C. Kondaleon (eds.), The Art of Ancient Spectacle, New Haven 1999, 198 prompting one to ask if they really could have been that sophisticated.
11. Cf. e. g. R. M. Ogilvie, A Commentary on Livy Books 1-5, Oxford 1965, 186.
12. and idem, Sulla and the Games of Hercules, AC 74, 2005, 217-223 where a tendency to rely on partial evidence is also noted.
13. P. G. Walsh, Making a Drama out of a Crisis: Livy on the Bachanalia, G & R 43, 1996, 188-203. See especially 195-199, 200-202.
14. It is true Wiseman detects missing dramas for example in Ovid, Plutarch and Suetonius: Wiseman (n. 4) 22-24, 30-32, 49-51, 61-62;
15. Dionysius of Halicarnassus: Wiseman (n. 15) 198. It is even supposed there may be a play to be found in a fragment of Fabius Pictor: Wiseman (n. 3) 4-5. I do not intend here to pass this material under review. The defects in concept and methodology, which are the same as those in the case of Livy, will, I trust be clear from what I have to say in the appendix to this paper.
16. E. Hemingway, The Killers, in: idem, Men Without Women, New York 1928.
17. For Hemingway and the theatre see C. Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, London 1969, 385-386, 394, 403-405.