Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 19, 2025
For the greater part of the fifty years which include Sulla and the Gracchi, Accius was the recognised literary master at Rome, president of the college of poets which held its meetings in the temple of Minerva on the Aventine, and associating on terms of full equality with the most distinguished statesmen.
Accius and Pacuvius are mentioned by Quintilian as writers of extraordinary merit. Of twenty-five comedies written by Plautus, the number transmitted to posterity is nineteen; and of a hundred and eight which Terence is said to have translated from Menander, there now remain only six. Excepting a few inconsiderable fragments, the writings of all the other authors have perished.
Some fix it at 178 B.C.; others as late as 129 B.C. The earlier date is the more probable. We then have to ask when Hostius himself lived. Teuffel inclines to place him before Accius; but most commentators assign him a later date. A few lines are preserved in Macrobius, which seem to point to an early period, e.g. "non si mihi linguae Centum atque ora sient totidem vocesque liquatae," and again,
Accius, like so many Romans, was a grammarian; he introduced certain changes into the received spelling, e.g. he wrote aa, ee, etc. when the vowel was long, reserving the single a, e, etc. for the short quantity. It was in acknowledgment of the interest taken by him in these studies that Varro dedicated to him one of his many philological treatises.
Accius paints action with vigour. We have the following spirited fragment "Constituit, cognovit, sensit, conlocat sese in locum Celsum: hinc manibus rapere raudus saxeum et grave." and again "Heus vigiles properate, expergite, Pectora tarda, sopore exsurgite!"
Accius and Pacuvius still hold their ground, while Virgil and Horace are considered rough and lacking delicacy!
Accius immediately took the one instrument and the other, and performed the prodigy in the face of the assembled people. Servius Tullius, the sixth king of Rome, was the model of a disinterested and liberal politician, and gave to his subjects those institutions to which, more than to any other cause, they were indebted for their subsequent greatness.
In the days of the Punic wars and afterwards, when everything Greek was popular, a Roman audience could appreciate stories of the Greek mythology, as presented in the tragedies of Ennius, Pacuvius, and Accius, if without learning to read in them the great problems of human life, at least as spectacles of the vicissitudes of human fortune; and had occasionally listened to a tragedy, or perhaps father a dramatic history, based on some familiar legend of their own State.
Accius An active author also in the field of literary history and grammar, he doubtless laboured to introduce instead of the crude manner of his predecessors greater purity of language and style into Latin tragedy; yet even his inequality and incorrectness were emphatically censured by men of strict observance like Lucilius. Greek Comedy Terence
But should a wise man be subject to grief, he may likewise be subject to anger; for as he is free from anger, he must likewise be free from grief. Who envies me the flower of my children? where the Latin is invidit florem. It may appear not good Latin, but it is very well put by Accius; for as video governs an accusative case, so it is more correct to say invideo florem than flori.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking