Note 34 — Chapter V

Although Cicero's notice of his own acquaintance with Accius, which is not likely to have existed before the former assumed the toga virilis, is a proof of the great age which the poet attained, it is not certain how long he continued the practice of his art. Seneca, in quoting from the Atreus of this poet the well-known tyrant's maxim, 'oderint dum metuant'—a maxim, according to Suetonius, constantly in the mouth of Caligula,—adds the remark that 'any one could see that it was written in the days of Sulla.' But Aulus Gellius, on the other hand, states that the Atreus was the play which had been read by the poet in his youth to Pacuvius at Tarentum. The termination of the literary career of Accius must have been soon after the beginning of the first century b.c., so that nearly half a century elapses between the last of the works of the older poets and the appearance of the great poem of Lucretius. The journey of Accius to Asia shows the beginning of that taste for foreign travel which became prevalent among the most educated men in a generation later, and grew more and more easy with the advance of Roman conquest, and more attractive from the increased cultivation of Greek literature. Accius is the first of the Roman poets who seems to have possessed a country residence; and some taste for country life and the beauties of Nature first betrays itself in one or two of his fragments. He possessed apparently all the self-esteem and high spirit of the earlier poets. Pliny mentions that though a very little man, he placed a colossal statue of himself in a temple of the Muses34.