38 RICHARD BUXTON 23· Cf. Ph. Geoffrey R. Lloyd, Aristotle: The Growth and Structure of his Thought (Cambndge: Cambndge Umverslty Press, I968), pp. I40-42; Bernd Manuwald, Studien zum Beweger in der Naturphilosophie des Aristoteles, Abhandlungen der Geistes- und Sozlalwlssenschaftlichen Klasse, 9 (Mainz: F. Steiner, I989), p. 9. 24· For some excellent preliminary remarks see Werner Jaeger, The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, I947), pp. 44-45. 25· KRS (= Geoffre.y S. Kirk, E. Raven and Malcolm Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, 2nd edn (Cambndge: Cambndge University Press, I983)), fro I7I. 26. KRS, ibid., fro 438. CHAPTER 3 A Stranger in a Strange Land: Medea in Roman Republican TragedyI Robert Cowan The first performance of a Roman version of a Greek tragedy in 240 BC was a momentous event. It was not the beginning of Roman appropriation of Greek culture - Rome had had contact and complex interaction with Greek communities in Magna Graecia and elsewhere from earliest times - but it was an important landmark in the relationship between Greece and Rome. 2 When a tragedy by Livius Andronicus was performed to celebrate victory over Carthage in the First Punic War, a central cultural practice of an alien culture was adopted, adapted, appropriated and transformed to serve as a central cultural practice of Rome. It is significant that the first tragedy celebrated a victory (albeit over Carthage), since the appropriation of Greek tragedy was an act of cultural conquest, as Roman actors marched into and occupied the stage of Attic drama. Yet the event was more complex than that description suggests. In Horace's phrase, captured Greece captured its savage master. 3 The writing ofRornan tragedy in the Greek style was simultaneously an act of self-confident literary invasion and of cultural submission to the thrall of a more established theatrical tradition. In terms of literary history, this complex interrelationship marks the beginning of Latin literature, in conjunction with Livius's Latin, Saturnian version of the Odyssey. In terms of culture, the flourishing of Roman drama coincided with the massive expansion of Roman territory and the accompanying challenge to its sense of identity. Dramas were performed at public festivals, ludi scaenici, organized by state officials, the aediles, and sponsored by influential elites. They were vehicles for establishing and promulgating elite Roman values, for constructing and re-asserting Roman identity. 4 How could they do this when the majority of their characters were Greeks? How did the figure of Medea, alien even to the Greeks, fit into this scheme? This is also an issue with that other Roman appropriation of Greek drama, the comoediae palliatae which Plautus, Terence and others translated, adapted, re-imagined from the Greek New Comedies of Menander and others. These are frequently set in Athens, but an Athens which bears a striking resemblance to Rome in its topography and in the language and behaviour of its inhabitants. Moreover, their nominally Greek characters occasionally refer to Greeks and behaviour in contrast to their own. 5 Tragedy is less playful with the dramatic illusion and hence \