Hosidius Geta ( ; fl. late 2nd – early 3rd century AD) was a
Roman
Roman or Romans most often refers to:
*Rome, the capital city of Italy
*Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD
*Roman people, the people of ancient Rome
*'' Epistle to the Romans'', shortened to ''Romans'', a lette ...
playwright.
Tertullian
Tertullian (; la, Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus; 155 AD – 220 AD) was a prolific early Christian author from Carthage in the Roman province of Africa. He was the first Christian author to produce an extensive corpus of L ...
refers to him as his contemporary in the ''De Prescriptione Haereticorum''.
Geta was the author of a tragedy in 462 verses titled ''Medea''. It is the earliest known example of a Virgilian
cento
The Middle East Treaty Organization (METO), also known as the Baghdad Pact and subsequently known as the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), was a military alliance of the Cold War. It was formed in 24 February 1955 by Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Tur ...
, that is, a poem constructed entirely out of lines and half-lines from the works of
Virgil
Publius Vergilius Maro (; traditional dates 15 October 7021 September 19 BC), usually called Virgil or Vergil ( ) in English, was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He composed three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: th ...
. The poet used Virgilian
hexameters
Hexameter is a metrical line of verses consisting of six feet (a "foot" here is the pulse, or major accent, of words in an English line of poetry; in Greek and Latin a "foot" is not an accent, but describes various combinations of syllables). It w ...
for the spoken parts of the play, and half-hexameters for the choral parts.
Bibliography
*Text edited by R. Lamacchia, ''Medea. Cento Vergilianus'' (Teubner, 1981)
*Text, Translation, and Commentary by Maria Teresa Galli
atin-Italian with English Summaries Vertumnus. Berliner Beiträge zur Klassischen Philologie und zu ihren Nachbargebieten, vol. 10, Göttingen: Edition Ruprecht 2017,
Sources
ancientlibrary.com
Further reading
*Scott C. McGill, "Tragic Vergil: rewriting Vergil as a tragedy in the Cento « Medea »," ''Classical World'' 95 (2001–2002) 143–161.
*N. Dane, "The Medea of Hosidius Geta," ''Classical Journal'' 46 (1950) 75–78.
*Giovanni Salanitro, "Osidio Geta e la poesia centonaria," ''ANRW'' 2.34.3: 2314–2360.
*Philip Hardie, "Polyphony or Babel? Hosidius Geta's Medea and the poetics of the cento," in Simon Swain, Stephen Harrison and
Jas Elsner (eds), ''Severan culture'' (Cambridge, CUP, 2007).
Ancient Roman tragic dramatists
Year of birth unknown
Year of death unknown
Hosidii
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