Like Alexandria, Pergamum was a center of literary and rhetorical studies, and presumably Accius's advanced capacities for scholarship and his energetic cultivation of his image as a scholar-poet were developed there. Accius returned to Rome, where he turned his talents to tragedy. He attracted the friendship and patronage of Decimus Iunius Brutus Callaicus, the consul of 138
B.C., whose victorious campaigns in Spain had brought him a triumph in 136
B.C. Accius wrote the triumphal inscription in Saturnians and his
Brutus in honor of his patron. Soon he was the master of the tragic stage and Rome's leading man of letters.
The genesis of Roman drama is obscure. That the ultimate origins of Roman comedy and tragedy are Greek is evident enough, but the details of how the Romans came to the practice of adapting Greek plays for the Roman stage is irrecoverable. Modern scholars have next to no secure knowledge of early Latin music, song, or dramatic performances. Perhaps the Etruscans played a role: the Latin words for actor and mask, histrio and persona, are Etruscan, and the Romans believed that their taste for spectacles had been acquired from the Etruscans. Unfortunately, the nature of dramatic composition and performance among the Etruscans is also a matter for speculation, and so these clues cannot take one far.
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