SOURCE: “Early Tragedy and Epic” in Life and Literature in the Roman Republic, University of California Press, 1930, pp. 30-64.

In the following excerpt, Frank notes Naevius’s innovations in drama, which include disregarding time and place and increasing the use of musical accompaniment; he also discusses the role of Naevius and his fellow dramatists in the development and eventual failure of Roman tragedy.

Browning has recalled the story of how Greek war captives taken at Syracuse in the Peloponnesian war earned their release by reciting snatches from the plays of Euripides. It was a century and a half after that seige that the Romans came to Sicily in the First Punic War, and the city was still interested in the old drama, indeed was now taking its part in producing tragedies. One of the last of the dramatists, one of the so-called “Pleiad,” was a Syracusan of Hiero...