Pacuvius
historical figure · 7 works · 8 mentions · 8 anchored passages
in the texts
On Moral Ends
Roman tragedian, author of the Antiopa.
For who is so hostile, almost, to the very name of Rome as to scorn or reject the Medea of Ennius or the Antiopa of Pacuvius, on the ground that, though he delights in the same plays of Euripides, he hates Latin letters?
Nay even 'wild beasts,' says Pacuvius, 'which lack the cunning of understanding for taking precaution,' when the terror of death is cast upon them 'shudder.
Academica
Roman poet cited as an example of successful Latin imitation of Greek literary models.
Or is it because Ennius, Pacuvius, Accius, and many others give delight, men who expressed not the words but the force of the Greek poets—how much more will the philosophers delight us, if, as those poets imitated Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, so these were to imitate Plato, Aristotle, and Theophrastus!
On the Commonwealth
Roman tragic poet whose image of a serpent-drawn chariot is invoked as a rhetorical device.
But now, if anyone could—in that chariot of Pacuvius, 'borne by winged serpents'—look down upon and survey with his eyes many and varied peoples and cities, he would see, first among that most uncorrupted people of the Egyptians, who keep in writing the memory of very many ages and events, that a certain ox is held a god, whom the Egyptians call Apis, and many other portents among them, and beasts …
On the Nature of the Gods
Roman tragedian quoted on the Latin and Greek terms for sky/ether, playfully noted to betray his Greek origin.
This in turn is embraced by the boundless ether, which consists of the highest fires (let us borrow this word too, and let ether be said in Latin as air is, though Pacuvius interprets it:
From the ether, then, arise the innumerable flames of the heavenly bodies, of which the chief is the sun, lighting up all things with the clearest light, many times greater and ampler than the whole earth;
Tusculan Disputations
Roman tragedian whose version of the Niptra, depicting Ulysses bearing his wound with restraint, is preferred to Sophocles's version.
\" (Pacuvius does this better than Sophocles;
for in him Ulysses laments very tearfully at his wound.
Letters to Lucilius
A governor of Syria who held nightly mock funeral rites for himself, an example Seneca repurposes from a bad conscience to a good one.
Pacuvius, who made Syria his own by long possession, when he had performed his own funeral rites with wine and those funeral feasts, used to have himself borne from dinner to his chamber in such a way that, amid the applause of his minions, this was chanted to music:
De Pallio
Roman tragic poet whose supposed authorship of a verse is invoked and denied.
You think it Pacuvius's tortoise?