“Sunt quos Pacuviusque et verrucosa moretur
Antiope, ærumnis cor luctificabile fulta.”
The Armorum Judicium was translated from Æschylus. With regard to the Dulorestes, (Orestes Servus,) there has been a good deal of discussion and difficulty. Nævius, Ennius, and Attius, are all said to have written tragedies which bore the title of Dulorestes; but a late German writer has attempted, at great length, to show that this is a misconception; and that all the fragments, which have been classed with the remains of these three dramatic poets, belong to the Dulorestes of Pacuvius, who was in truth the only Latin poet who wrote a tragedy with this appellation. What the tenor or subject of the play, however, may have been, he admits is difficult to determine, as the different passages, still extant, refer to very different periods of the life of Orestes; which, I think, is rather adverse to his idea, that all these fragments were written by the same person, and belonged to the same tragedy, unless, [pg 212]indeed, Pacuvius had utterly set at defiance the observance of the celebrated unities of the ancient drama. On the whole, however, he agrees with Thomas Stanley, in his remarks on the Chœphoræ of Æschylus, that the subject of the Chœphoræ, which is the vengeance taken by Orestes on the murderers of his father, is also that of the Dulorestes of Pacuvius[338]. Some of the fragments refer to this as an object not yet accomplished:—
“Utinam nunc maturescam ingenio, ut meum patrem
Ulcisci queam.” ——
The Hermione turned on the murder of Pyrrhus by Orestes at the instigation of Hermione. Cicero, in his Treatise De Amicitia, mentions, in the person of Lælius, the repeated acclamations which had recently echoed through the theatre at the representation of the new play of his friend Pacuvius, in that scene where Pylades and Orestes are introduced before the king, who, being ignorant which of them is Orestes, whom he had predetermined should be put to death, each insists, in order to save the life of his friend, that he himself is the real person in question. Delrio alleges that the new play here alluded to by Cicero was the Hermione; but that play, as well as the Dulorestes, related to much earlier events than the friendly contest between Pylades and Orestes, which took place at the court of Thoas, King of Tauris, and was the concluding scene in the dramatic life of Orestes, being long subsequent to the murder of his mother, his trial in presence of the Argives, or absolution at Athens before the Areopagus. Accordingly, Tiraboschi states positively that this new play of Pacuvius, which obtained so much applause, was his Pylades et Orestes[339].
In the Iliona, the scene where the shade of Polydorus, who had been assassinated by the King of Thrace, appears to his sister Iliona, was long the favourite of a Roman audience, who seem to have indulged in the same partiality for such spectacles as we still entertain for the goblins in Hamlet and Macbeth.
All the plays above mentioned were imitated or translated by Pacuvius from the Greek. His Paulus, however, was of his own invention, and was the first Latin tragedy formed on a Roman subject. Unfortunately there are only five lines of it extant, and these do not enable us to ascertain, which Ro[pg 213]man of the name of Paulus gave title to the tragedy. It was probably either Paulus Æmilius, who fell at Cannæ, or his son, whose story was a memorable instance of the instability of human happiness, as he lost both his children at the moment when he triumphed for his victory over Perseus of Macedon.
From no one play of Pacuvius are there more than fifty lines preserved, and these are generally very much detached. The longest passages which we have in continuation are a fragment concerning Fortune, in the Hermione—the exclamations of Ulysses, while writhing under the agony of a recent wound, in the Niptra, and the following fine description of a sea-storm introduced in the Dulorestes:—
“Interea, prope jam occidente sole, inhorrescit mare;