ABSTRACT
The first performance of a Roman version of a Greek tragedy in 240 BC was a momentous event. 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. Euripides' Medea addresses her new friends simply as 'Corinthian women' but Ennius's stresses their economic, social, marital, and — since the terms he uses are fundamentally Roman — ethnic status. Medea is depicted in terms of a Roman general or proconsul, whose activities away from the fatherland bring glory to himself and the res publica. The appropriation of Greek tragedy both enabled and compelled the Romans to engage in the formation of a tradition which was simultaneously a pendent to and a continuation of an already established Greek tradition.
