In my last post I looked at Plutarch’s description of the teaching career of Spurius Carvilius and compared it to Suetonius’ description of the teaching career of Livius Andronicus. I noted how it was odd that neither of those two authors had attempted to put these two teaching careers in conversation with each other and remarked that it might have been because each was working with a different chronology of early Roman literary history.
A Latin author from the second century Common Era, a certain Aulus Gellius, combines the histories of Livius Andronicus and Spurius Carvilius in the following account:
Annis deinde postea paulo pluribus quam viginti, pace cum Poenis facta, consulibus C. Claudio Centhone, Appii Caeci filio, et M. Sempronio Tuditano, primus omnium L. Livius poeta fabulas docere Romae coepit post Sophoclis et Euripidis mortem annis plus fere centum et sexaginta, post Menandri annis circiter quinquaginta duobus…
Anno deinde post Romam conditam quingentesimo undevicesimo Sp. Carvilius Ruga primus Romae de amicorum sententia divortium cum uxore fecit, quod sterila esset iurassetque apud censores, uxorem se liberum quaerundorum causa habere,eodemque anno Cn. Naevius poeta fabulas apud populum dedit, quem M. Varro in libro De Poetis primo stipendia fecisse ait bello Poenico primo, idque ipsum Naevium dicere in eo carmine quod de eodem bello scripsit.
Then, just a little bit more than twenty years later, after peace had been made with the Carthaginians, during the consulships of C. Claudius Centho, the son of Appius Caecius, and M. Sempronius Tuditanus, the first poet of them all, L. Livius, began to produce plays at Rome, just more than 160 years after the death of Sophocles and Euripides and around fifty-two years after the death of Menander…
Then during the 519th year of the founding of Rome, Spurius Carvilius Ruga was the first man at Rome to divorce his wife with the advice of his friends, because she was sterile and he was designated by the censors to take a wife for the purpose of producing a child. In that same year Cn. Naevius, the poet, presented plays to the populace. That man, whom according to M. Varro in the first book of his De Poetis, is the same one who participated during the first Punic war, and that Naevius himself says this in the poem he wrote on that same war. (17.21.41-5)
As Beare notes in his 1940 article, Gellius is almost certainly thinking of Spurius Carvilius’ freedman here, as why else include the bit about the divorce in the midst of a discussion of early Roman literary history? Likely the date of Sprurius Carvilius’ divorce was the only piece of information from the life of freedman teacher that had a precise date. I would argue that we could probably read this date as Gellius’ shorthand for the year that the freedman teacher became famous. In which case, it is important that Gellius dates the divorce to the 519th year of the founding of Rome, that is, the year 235.
A Latin author from the second century Common Era, a certain Aulus Gellius, combines the histories of Livius Andronicus and Spurius Carvilius in the following account:
Annis deinde postea paulo pluribus quam viginti, pace cum Poenis facta, consulibus C. Claudio Centhone, Appii Caeci filio, et M. Sempronio Tuditano, primus omnium L. Livius poeta fabulas docere Romae coepit post Sophoclis et Euripidis mortem annis plus fere centum et sexaginta, post Menandri annis circiter quinquaginta duobus…
Anno deinde post Romam conditam quingentesimo undevicesimo Sp. Carvilius Ruga primus Romae de amicorum sententia divortium cum uxore fecit, quod sterila esset iurassetque apud censores, uxorem se liberum quaerundorum causa habere,eodemque anno Cn. Naevius poeta fabulas apud populum dedit, quem M. Varro in libro De Poetis primo stipendia fecisse ait bello Poenico primo, idque ipsum Naevium dicere in eo carmine quod de eodem bello scripsit.
Then, just a little bit more than twenty years later, after peace had been made with the Carthaginians, during the consulships of C. Claudius Centho, the son of Appius Caecius, and M. Sempronius Tuditanus, the first poet of them all, L. Livius, began to produce plays at Rome, just more than 160 years after the death of Sophocles and Euripides and around fifty-two years after the death of Menander…
Then during the 519th year of the founding of Rome, Spurius Carvilius Ruga was the first man at Rome to divorce his wife with the advice of his friends, because she was sterile and he was designated by the censors to take a wife for the purpose of producing a child. In that same year Cn. Naevius, the poet, presented plays to the populace. That man, whom according to M. Varro in the first book of his De Poetis, is the same one who participated during the first Punic war, and that Naevius himself says this in the poem he wrote on that same war. (17.21.41-5)
As Beare notes in his 1940 article, Gellius is almost certainly thinking of Spurius Carvilius’ freedman here, as why else include the bit about the divorce in the midst of a discussion of early Roman literary history? Likely the date of Sprurius Carvilius’ divorce was the only piece of information from the life of freedman teacher that had a precise date. I would argue that we could probably read this date as Gellius’ shorthand for the year that the freedman teacher became famous. In which case, it is important that Gellius dates the divorce to the 519th year of the founding of Rome, that is, the year 235.