Cneo Nevio
(Cneo or Gneo Nevio; Campania, c .270-Útica, c .201 a.J.C.) Latin poet.The initiator of Latin poetry, he is the author of an epic about the First Punic War ( Bellum poenicum ), in which the legends of the founding of Rome are evoked for the first time.He composed tragedies with a Greek theme and created the tragedy with a Roman theme ( Raising Romulus and Remus , Clastidus ), antecedent to the Plautus theater.
From perhaps from a plebeian family, Cneo Nevio fought in the First Punic War and in 235, five years after the first dramatic representation of Livio Andrónico, began his career as a comic and tragic author.Later he would become the creator of the Roman drama with a national theme ("Fable praetexta").By his free and aggressive language, he attracted the hostility of the powerful, and ended up in jail for having attacked Quintus Cecilio Metellus, the consul of 206.Released, he was exiled to Utica, in Africa, where he died.
Nevio
Of all Nevio's vast production we only have titles and a few fragments.We know of some thirty comedies (the best part of his dramatic work, which also included imitated Greek tragedies) and of two "praetextae": Clastidium (Clastidium), about the victory achieved in 222 by Marco Claudio Marcelo on the Gauls, and Romulus (Raising Romulus and Remus).From a Satura we completely ignore the content and the character.
His epic Bellum poenicum (The Punic War) had great importance in the history of Latin literature, written in meter Saturn, the ancient Roman popular verse; Even though it was considered vulgar and inelegant by the critics of the next generation, the Romans always admired this poem that celebrates, in archaic language and austere style, mythical traditions and national glories.From this work, which should have included some 4,000 Saturnian verses, we have received quite a few fragments; but from the very matter in question, from the quotations and numerous judgments that the ancients left us about it, as well as how much later poets, and mainly Virgil, drew from it, we can get an idea of the remarkable importance , especially historical, which had in Latin literature.
The two books that served as a proem and dealt for the first time in Roman literature with the legends of the founding of Rome by Romulus, who here is a direct descendant of Aeneas, followed books III-VII, in which, without considering the intermediate period, the First Punic War was recounted in detail: the content of the poem was, therefore, essentially historical, quite close by its argument (and even by its form, judging by the brief preserved fragments) to the annals of historians.Like Virgil later, Nevio wants to link the Punic war with the prehistory of Rome and Carthage, and to this end he looks for the distant causes of historical events, for whose account he probably relied mainly on the historian Quinto Fabio Píctor and the legends of Aeneas, spread in Greece as early as the 4th century by Timaeus of Tauromenio.
The poetic value of the preserved fragments is not very high, since in Nevio the historian prevails over the poet; there is, however, a certain warmth of eloquence, a rather expressive archaic brevity in the verses in which the poet extols the Roman power.For this reason and for being the first original manifestation of Latin poetry, Nevio's poem had great fame in antiquity: Ennio and, above all, Virgilio, used it widely; Cicero mentions it repeatedly with praise, and in Horace's time, it was still read and admired.
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