Hosidius Geta Explained

Hosidius Geta (; fl. late 2nd – early 3rd century AD) was a Roman playwright. Tertullian 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, that is, a poem constructed entirely out of lines and half-lines from the works of Virgil. The poet used Virgilian hexameters 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 [Latin-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).