Early Latin Poetry

ROMAN poetry begins in 514 (about 240 B. C.) with Livius Andronicus, who translated the Odyssey into Saturnian verse, — a work about which we know nothing that is interesting except that Horace probably had the same feeling towards it as most schoolboys now have towards Horace; for it was the book which he had to study under the ferula of the proverbially severe Orbilius.

In the very early poets of Rome, what most strikes us is a strange unevenness of execution. They do not seem to have caught any apprehension of that subtile quality which should distinguish even the humblest poetry from the very most ambitious prose. In our own literature instances of this insensitiveness to the essential difference between poetry and prose are very rare, and they hardly ever coexist with occasional elevation. In early Latin poetry lapses into mere prose are common, and yet we often meet real poetry side by side with them. Brilliant gifts of expression and true elevation of sentiment are found coexisting with abject humbleness of style, or even insensibility to the very existence of such a tiling as style.

Macaulay quotes from Blackmore a so-called poem which is certainly marked by a “ plentiful lack ” of inspiration : —

But this attempt at description, bald as it is, almost soars in comparison with some specimens of early Latin poetry which have come down to us; for instance, this passage from the epic of Ntevius on the Punic war : —

or: —

or, as Ennius writes : —

a passage which, though it rises a little in the expression “ auguries august,” certainly creeps in the cautious accuracy of “ more or less,” and reminds us of a Dublin story, how a solicitor, in challenging to a duel another member of his own profession, invited him to meet him in the Phoenix Park “ in the Fifteen Acres, he the same more or less.”

Again, Ennius, after a really fine verse invoking the Muses, goes on to explain that Muses is a Greek word corresponding to the Latin Casmence. This is what strikes us in early Latin poetry, — real distinction and utter poverty of style side hv side and hand in hand. Place beside the bald and uncouth verses quoted just now from Nsevius those fine Saturnians of his : —

( "Seseque ei perire malvolunt ibidem Quam cum stupro rebitere ad sues populares; ”)

and beside the Ennian passage put that grand utterance which has been compared to the voice of an oracle, and which kindled the enthusiasm of the inspired Virgil: —

(“ Moribusantiques statresRoiuauavirisque ; ”)

and we shall then see clearly this strange quality which distinguishes the early Latin poets from those of Greece, and other nations too, — that they were content to creep, though they knew what it was to fly, and that they seem hardly to be aware when they are on the ground, and when in the clouds.

Quintilian relates an anecdote which shows in what honor the epic of Ennius was held. One Sextus Annalis brought some charge against a client of Cicero’s, and in the course of the trial proudly demanded, “ Have you anything to say about Sextus Annalis ? ” That is, “ Have you any charge to bring against my character ? ” But the words num quid pates de sexto Annali are susceptible of a quite different meaning. Cicero pretended to understand him to mean, "Can you repeat anything out of the sixth book of the Annals ? ” “ To be sure I can,” at once replied the consular wag (scurra consular is was a favorite sobriquet for Cicero), and he thundered forth the sonorous line,

to the enthusiastic delight of his audience and the whole court. Opinion about Ennius underwent a steady change in successive ages. Lucretius calls him “ immortal,” œternns : in Propertius, he begins to be "rough,” hirsutus : Ovid characterizes him as

Martial complains that people are so tasteless that they will read Ennius though they have Virgil; in the time of Silius Italicus, Ennius is so completely portion and parcel of the past that Silius introduces him as a character into his poem.

But Ennius, interesting though he is as the founder of the Roman epic and of satire, must no longer engage our attention except in so far as he affected the early Latin drama, which is the chief subject of this paper. As the real founder of Roman poetry, Quintilian finely says of him, in a well-known passage,¹ that we should reverence him as some sacred grove of venerable antiquity whose grand old trees have more majesty than beauty.

A generation ago, historians of Latin literature usually discussed the question, Why had Rome no tragedy ? Such critics could find no Roman tragedy because they looked for it only in the declamations of Seneca, which probably were never put on the stage. They did not go so far back even as the Medea of Ovid and the Thyestes of Varius, which Quintilian put on a par with the Attic drama, or the tragedies of Pollio, which Virgil and Horace thought worthy of the Sophoclean buskin. Still less did they think of turning their eyes to the stage of Ennius, Paeuvius, and Attius. It is only recently, comparatively speaking. that the efforts of Continental scholarship have presented to us the fragments in which these dramatists have come down to us in such a shape as to render any literary appreciation possible. There are certain evidences that tragedy was held in estimation in the Rome of the Ciceronian epoch. These evidences are broadly the testimony of Cicero and of Horace. Latin tragedy took the Greek models in inverse order, and adopted Euripides first. The Ennian version is literal, and, like Roman comedy, postulates in the audience a knowledge of Greek. Sometimes, where we have an opportunity of comparing the Latin translation with the Greek original, we find the Latin awkward and clumsy. A fine passage in the Iphigenia in Aulis runs:—

It is hard to give in English the Ennian version of it without exaggerating its homeliness, but it may perhaps be rendered : —

The Greek and Latin passages agree in being both perfectly plain and simple ; but the Ennian is almost vulgar, and its simplicity is that of Rejected Addresses:

while the simplicity of the Greek is that which so deeply affects us in a great line in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi : —

Perhaps we might venture to say that the vulgarity in the Latin lies in the word honeste ; to weep is not consistent with a king’s position in society.

It is interesting to detect in these very ancient and somewhat rude efforts of a nation just emerging from absolute illiteracy something parallel to our own literature ; something to remind us that there are touches of nature which make generations kin, however widely sundered in space and time.

is a very true reflection of Shakespeare’s and a similar thought must have presented itself to the mind of Ennius when he wrote : —

The whole spirit of the fine poem,

resides in the Ennian verse,

The fierce question of Shylock,

is anticipated in

and “ A friend in need is a friend indeed ” finds a literal counterpart in

It is strange to meet as early as in Ennius a maxim which modern novelists would do well to lay to heart: —

Pacuvius was the rival and nephew of Ennius. Like Euripides, he was a painter as well as a poet, and “ Pictor,” the surname of the Fabii, shows that art was then held in high esteem. He learned the bitterness of being eclipsed by a younger rival, Attius, and retired to Tarentum (the ideal retreat of Horace), there to spend the closing years of a long and distinguished life. Aulus Gellins tells us that there he was visited by Attius, who read to him his Atreus. The old poet found in it elevation and brilliancy, but detected a certain harshness and unripeness. “ So much the better,” said Attius. “ The mind is like a fruit, harsh while it is growing, but mellow when it attains maturity. If it is soft too soon, it is spoiled before it ripens thoroughly. I like to have something to grow out of.” This is a very just remark. The young man whose essay shows nothing turgid, no ungraceful ornament or flashy rhetoric, will never do much as a writer. Dr. Johnson’s advice to his young friend to cut out all the fine passages illustrates His ticklish temper rather than his sound judgment. On the whole, as Andrew Lang has somewhere said, one would prefer to see a very young writer rather a dandy in his manner. The affectations are annoying, but he will probably grow out of them, if he happens not to be a prig. It is well that he should feel it necessary to dress his thoughts before he brings them into company.

Ribbeck calls Pacuvius the freedman of Euripides, because, though mainly dependent on Euripides, he modifies the art of the Greek poet with far greater boldness than Ennius or Attius.

The less agreeable features in Pacuvius are his audacity in coining monstrous compounds, like repandirostruvi and incurvicervicum, and his poverty of invention. The latter failing is revealed by the fact that we find in his fragments traces of three different and separate storms. No doubt he excelled in this kind of description, and so lie recurs to it whenever he wants an effect. We have abundant proofs of his popularity. Plautus parodies him more than once; Lucretius borrows his expression “hoc circum supraque,” "he spacious firmament on high ; ” and it was during the performance of a play of his that the actor who was playing the part of the sleeping Ilione went to sleep in reality, while twelve hundred spectators joined in the appeal of Catienus on the stage, — the appeal to Ilione to awake. The way in which Horace relates the anecdote shows that the plays of Pacuvius must have been very popular and very familiar to the audiences of the time. A fine passage in the Medus (son of Medea by Ægeus) proves that Pacuvius is not merely a poet who can produce ingenious philosophical reflections and vigorous descriptions. The portrait of the unhappy dethroned rEetes, a kind of ancient Lear,

is the work of one who can raise pity and terror, and worthily describe human passion and suffering. His last triumph was at the funeral of the murdered Caesar, in the year of the city 710. Among other songs sung in honor of the dead was one from the Armorum Judicium. There was a sad appropriateness to the occasion in the cry of Ajax, —

Velleius gives Attius the palm among the tragic poets. He took jEschylus for his model, not Sophocles or Euripides, as did his predecessors, hut seems largely to have adopted the practice called contaminatio, and to have fused together different dramas, and even different authors. Thus we find in his Armorum Judicium. which he borrowed from yEschylus, the well-known verse taken by him from the Ajax of Sophocles, and afterwards adapted from him by Virgil: —

(“ Virtute sis par, dispar fortunis patris.”)

He also uses Homer, and even Apollonius Rliodius, whose very spirited description of the astonishment of the Colchian shepherds at the first sight of a ship seems to be reproduced in a passage cited by Cicero.

Like Ennius and Pacuvius, Attius was of humble birth, the son or grandson of a freedman. But the obscurity of bis birth was to him no “ invidious bar ; ” to quote a verse of his own : —

(“ A man may dignify his rank ; no rank Can dignify a man.”)

We have already heard his confident answer to the aged Pacuvius, and we are told by Valerius Maximus that when Caesar entered tlie Collegium Poetarum, a kind of ancient analogue of the French Academy, Attius did not rise. He acknowledged the superior rank of Caesar, but added, “ Here the question is, not who has most ancestors, but wlio has most works to point to.”

Ennius excelled in sententious gravity, pathos, and naturalness ; Pacuvius, in elaboration of style which earned him the name doctus, and which sometimes, as in his ponderous compounds, degenerated into pedantry and affectation. The strength of Attius lay in bis spirit and elevation of style, for which Horace called him altus, and Ovid animosus. His “ Oderint dum metuant ” (“ Let them hate me, so they fear me too ”) is a thunder-word, and has ever been a favorite quotation with tyrants, from Tiiberius to Bismarck.

The elevation of Attius is very marked. The Atreus which he read to Pacuvius begins with a stately passage much admired by Cicero, Quintilian, and Seneca :

(“ I’m Lord of Argos, heir of Pelops’ crown, Far as the Hellespont and Ionian main Heat on the Isthmus,’ )

a passage which strikes us by the weight of names great in myth-land and heroland, and produces a vague impression of majesty, like Milton’s

We are told by Plutarch that when the great tragic actor JEsopus uttered these words he entered so keenly into the spirit of the passage that he struck dead at his feet a slave who approached too near to the majesty of Argos.

Again, do not the following lines strongly recall the wise and sober but lofty dignity of Tennyson’s King Arthur ? —

And we meet now and then a sentiment quite in the vein of the Idylls: —

In some places the boldness of the Attian diction touches the borders of bombast, as when he says : —

(“ From the reverberating cliffs around Starts Echo musical with clangorous peal Of startled laughter; ”)

or when Thyestes is described as

The sound common sense which underlies this excitability of spirit has already been illustrated by the interview of Attius with Pacuvius. A further instance of it is given us by Quintilian. So great an admiration, he tells us, was felt for the forensic powers shown in the Attian tragedies that the poet’s friends asked him why he did not become an advocate. “ Because,” he replied, “ in my plays the speakers say what I please, and so the other characters can perfectly demolish their arguments ; but in the courts, on the contrary, I find that my adversaries invariably say the very things I would rather they had left unsaid.

But in Attius. as in all the Latin tragic poets, we have to deplore a certain want of control. The easy, delicate grace of Greek tragedy was unattainable by the Latin dramatists, and they tried to supply its place by a vigor and amplitude which are excessive and out of place. A ou will remember the opening verses of Euripides’ Phœnissæ, which may be rendered :

How does this appear in Attius ?

The grace is lost; the attributes of the sun, which are merely glanced at (but in most stately phrase) in the Greek, are detailed and catalogued in the Latin. This is the main characteristic of early Latin tragedy. It is too much “ in King Cambyses’ vein.” It substitutes strength for sweetness, heat for light. Our own literature supplies an analogous phenomenon and in a still more exaggerated degree. “ He is altogether set do evil” in the Psalms is grand in its simplicity; it becomes in the New Version by Nathaniel Brady and Nahum Tate (who, I regret to say, was a scholar of Trinity College, Dublin),

and “ Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? ” swells (yet shrinks) into

Like Latin tragedy, the version of Tate and Brady tried to make repetition and exaggeration compensate for the absence of grace and taste.

The first glimpse we obtain of a national comedy in Italy is in those charming sketches which Horace and Virgil give us of rustic merrymakings at harvests and vintage festivals, in which not only rude dances found a place, but a kind of rough banter in Saturnian verse was exchanged between peasants with masks of bark rudely improvised for the occasion. But this “ Fescennine licence,” even when developed into the “ medley ” which Livy describes at the beginning of the seventh hook of his history, still wanted an essential quality of a play, namely, unity of plot, until it began to draw on the resources of the Greek drama. Thus, in the words of Livy, a mere masque or revel gradually had become a work of art, and a regular class of actors, histriones, arose. From improvised chants without dialogue or plot to a regular comedy such as those of Plautus and Terence is a very long step. Hampered as it was by police regulations, and laboring under the ban of public opinion, the histrionic impulse of Italy would never have made this step by itself. It was forced to take its comedy straight from Athens, and to infuse into it a spirit distinctly antagonistic to the national mind of Rome. Perhaps it is in this quality in Roman comedy that we are to find a justification for the puzzling observation of Quintilian that comedy is the weak point of Latin literature.” Probably, however, it is safer to attribute Quintilian’s criticism to some revulsion of taste against comedy strictly so called which seems to have occurred under the Empire.² It is hard, of course, for us to institute a comparison between Latin comedy and tragedy, because while we have between twenty and thirty Latin comedies, and not one complete Greek exemplar with which to compare them, in tragedy, on the other hand, we have an abundant supply of the Greek models, but not one single perfect, or even nearly perfect, Latin copy.

The most remarkable feature in Latin comedy is the fact that the scene was invariably laid out of Rome, — usually at Athens, — and the dramatis personae were of Greece, not Rome; so were the costumes and the coinage. In all the plays of Plautus and Terence we do not find mention of a single Roman coin ; when Romans are mentioned, they are called barbari, and Italy is barbaria. Whether this was a police regulation which insisted that the scene should be laid abroad, lest Romans or Roman institutions should seem to be satirized, or whether it resulted from the incapacity of the Roman playwrights to rise from mere translation to adaptation, it is certain, at all events, that the Roman poets themselves accepted the situation and boasted of it. In the prologue to the Menaechini Plautus declares : —

But still they aimed at presenting Roman society as it unfolded itself to their eyes. Plautus says that he would not have dreamed of making a son rival to his father in a disgraceful intrigue, were it not that such a case had come under his own personal observation; and Cicero maintains "the aim of the drama to be to hold up a mirror to our own manners, and to give us the express image of our daily life.” This attempt at the same time to give the piece a foreign character, and yet to bring the scenes home to the Roman audience, introduced certain confusions which impart a very odd semblance to Latin comedy. Roman gods and ritual, Roman legal and military terms, find their way into the Greek world; cetitles and tresmri jostle agoranomi and demarche ; a speaker in a play in which the scene is laid in Ætolia, Ephesus, or Epidanmus will remark that he lias justcome from the Velabrum or the Capitolium. We remember how, in Hamlet, the gravedigger sends his fellow-workman from Denmark to an English village to fetch him a stqup of liquor, and how Shakespeare introduces English names and characters into Athens in the Midsummer Night’s Dream. But these lapses of memory, exceptional in Shakespeare, are the rule in Latin comedy, which addressed an audience by no means familiar with the foreign world which was its scene, though we must presume them to have had considerable familiarity with the Greek tongue; else surely Plautus would not have made puns unintelligible without a knowledge of Greek, or introduced three new words coined from the Greek into one verse in the Miles Gloriosus. Horace not only denies to Plautus humor and metrical skill, but he charges him with a desire to make money as quickly as possible, an indifference to the requirements of true art, and a consequent tendency to hurry with undue haste to the dénouement of his plays, a fault which lie says he has in common with the Sicilian Epicharmus. It is true that the play is often wound up very suddenly. Indeed, in the Casina, the epilogue naively informs us that tile denouement will take place inside. But, on the other hand, the Curculio is excellently constructed, and so are the Epidicus, which Plautus tells us he loved better than his own life, and the Pseudolus and Truculentus, which Cicero informs us were the work and the favorites of his old age. It is curious that these are plays which turn on an attempt to cheat or overreach (frustratio), not on the more familiar theme of love or amativeness (amatio.) These two motifs, or a fusion of them, as when a man is deprived of his mistress by some clever stratagem, are by far the commonest in Plautus. Two plays, the Trinummus and the Captivi, have neither of these motifs, but depict, one the noble fidelity of friend to friend, the other of slave to master. The Rudens turns on a shipwreck and the right of asylum. The Captivi and Bacchides are perhaps the best constructed of the plays, and Plautus regrets that he cannot find more models for a play like the former, where the moral tendency is so excellent. The Miles is spoiled by the introduction of the speech of Palæstrio, explaining the plot in the manner of a prologue, after the action has begun. So in the Cistellaria the play opens with an admirable dialogue between the girls Silenium and Gymnasium and an old procuress, and it is only in the third scene that the goddess Auxilium speaks the prologue. Another great blot on the construction of the Miles is the very long though very clever diatribe of Periplecomenus on the blessings of celibacy and the hollowness of society, which for one hundred and seventy verses completely stops the action of the piece. We must, however, remember that these defects in construction would not be at all so noticeable in plays which really rather resembled our opera bouffe than a modern comedy, — plays in which by far the most of the scenes were sung to the accompaniment of an instrument of music, and in which there was no division into acts and scenes save where the exigencies of the plot required that an actor should leave the stage at the end of one scene, and appear again at the beginning of the next, on which occasions a flute player entertained the audience while the stage was empty.

In some respects the Amphitruo is the most original of the plays of Plautus. Whether it is to be classed as a fabula Jihintonica or as a iλɑρoτρɑγωδiɑ (both have been suggested), it seems to demand some classification which will distinguish it from the other plays. A Roman tone pervades it,” as Professor Palmer remarks. “ In reading the account given by Sosia of the campaign against the Telebote, we feel as if Plautus had versified a page of some old Latin annalist. The ultimatum of Amphitruo, with its demand for restitution and threat in case of refusal, the pitched battle and crushing defeat of the enemy, the slaying of the commander in chief by A111pliitruo’s own hand.—all these are in real Livian style.” Alcmena is a high type of a Roman wife, and a risqué subject is treated with a delicacy which contrasts most favorably with the work of such modern imitators as Moliere and Dryden.

It would be, of course, quite impossible, in the space at our disposal, to analyze, or even characterize, all the Latin comedies which have come down to ns. We may, however, inquire in a general manner bow, on the whole, they deal with the different factors of society which were presented to them ; how they deal, that is, with political, civil, and domestic life.

Political life is, owing to the circumstances which surrounded the composition and production of ancient comedy, but lightly touched. We find references to the unfairness of the tediles in awarding the literary prizes, and to the summary proceedings of the triumviri, or police of Rome. But these are chiefly in prologues, and we cannot be sure that all the prologues of Plautus are not quite post-Plautine ; some of them demonstrably are. They are subservient to the explanation of the plot, like those of Euripides, but generally are disfigured by cumbrous bantering of the audience. The prologues of Terence, on the other hand, which are undoubtedly genuine, undertake the defense of the poet’s own literary views, and rebut the strictures of adverse critics, thus resembling rather the par aba sis of Greek comedy than the prologues of Euripides. But much more indicative of the political views of Plautus than his gibes at aaliles and triumviri is the bitter and sustained attack on the vices of the governing classes ; for we are constantly hearing that the aged reprobate, who is as ridiculous as he is vicious, is a pillar of the state, a column of the senate, a protector of the poor. It is strange that such assaults on a class should have been permitted in a city where personal allusion of any kind was punishable by law.

To pass, then, to the civil and domestic spheres, we have very little description of professional or mercantile life as such. The Mercator might as well be anything else as a merchant; we hear only of his amatory intrigues. We have, however. in the Rudens a description of the hardships of a fisherman’s life which reminds us of an idyl of Theocritus, anti in the Memeclnni we have a physician. Here and elsewhere we find that physicians, then as now, were prone to use terms derived from the Greek. In the Curculio, even the slave Palinuvus has enough knowledge of medicine to tell Cappadox. who complains of an acute pain in his liver, that he is suffering from a morbus hepatarius. The letters of Cicero show us that in his time physicians wrote their prescriptions in Greek, as they now do in Latin, and that it was customary to speak of ailments and their cures by their Greek names. There is in the Poenulus a strange occupation, that of the professional perjurer. The most common callings are those of tine banker and money-lender, the parasite and the pimp, around whom cluster the professional beauties, who are by no means as good as they are beautiful. Ladies, on the other hand, ingenuce, whether matrons or maids, are always virtuous, though often very disagreeable, as Artemona in the Asinaria. The picture of the girls who are in the train of the pander is very strange. Philematium in the Mostellaria, though belonging to this class, is almost charming, with her girlish love for dress and her sincere affection for Philolaches. Philocomasium in the Miles has enough grace to prefer Pleusicles to the wealthy captain, ami to be faithful under strongtemptation. Mekenis in the Cistellaria, Philenium in the Asinaria, and Lemniselene in the Persa are all capable of a disinterested love. But other Plautine girls are redeemed only by their cleverness, and the candor (if that is a redeeming point) with which they avow their depravity. Plautus himself, both in the Miles and in the Cistellaria. dwells on the heartlessness of such women, and he moralizes on the wretched end to which a life of wicked indulgence leads in a passage which probably suggested to Lucretius his terribly powerful treatment of the same theme. Even in the case of abandoned girls whom we might almost regard as attractive Plautus never lets us forget what they are. The atmosphere is not adverse to morality, as is that of the French novel. Such women are not intended to attract one, like the Dame aux Camellias or Ninon de l’Enclos. There are slaves of all kinds, but, with the exception of Tyndarus in the Captivi and Stasimus in the Trinummus, they are the vilest of the vile, and seek a revenge in the abasement of their masters for the ill treatment and oppression which are their lot.

Plautus is as ready as Cicero to apply to Rome the Frenchman’s aphorism about Paris: "On ne vie qu’à Paris, et l’on vdgete ailleurs. He speaks in a tone of contempt of the Italian towns, and especially makes the Praenestines his butt for their habit of docking the first syllable of a word, and thus turning cioonia, "a stork,” into conia. “ Do you think you are in the country ? ” asks one slave of another in the Mostellaria, when the latter is making an unseemly uproar in the street.

The late Professor Sellar remarks that Plautus could not describe a gentleman. "Nothing can be meaner than the conduct of the second Memechmus, who is intended to interest ns, in his relations with Erotion ; and this failure is equally conspicuous in another of his favorite characters, Periplecomenus ” in the Miles, whose indecorous geniality is, to us, somewhat repulsive.

In this respect, as in the gusto with which he dwells on the pleasures of good living, Plautus reminds us of Dickens more than of any other humorist. We cannot but think of the very thick strokes and glaring colors of Dickens’s character-painting, of his Quilps and Pecksniffs, when we find Euclid the miser, in the Aulularia, carefully preserving the parings of his nails, and regretting his tears on account of the waste of water which they entail.

All these types which we have been examining are considerably different in Terence. The braggart captain is only vain, not a fool, and is more like the Falstaff of Henry IV. than of the Merry Wives of Windsor. The parasite is simply a flatterer. The slave is not an oppressed creature, at war with society, but a well-treated domestic, who puts his shrewdness at his master’s service, and often shows devotion and honesty. There is no longer a sharp distinction between meretrix and ingenua, except in the unfortunate condition of the former. She is as refined in her manners as her more reputable sister, and generally an unexpected disclosure at the end reveals that she was really a lady, and was changed at birth. The husbands of Terence are far better husbands, and the wives — for instance, Sostrata in the Hecyra — are more amiable, than those of Plautus. His young men are lovers rather than libertines, and his old men show them a better example. Terence, it may be said, painted men as they ought to be, Plautus as they are.

It is strange that Sedigitus places Terence only sixth in his list of comic poets, which he heads with Cæcilius, Plautus, and Nævius. Cicero refers to Terence as the true model of Latinity, and allows that in this matter the authority of Ciecilius is small. The ancients made Ciecilius first in the choice of plot, Plautus in dialogue, Terence in delineation of character. But so high was the estimate of the elegance of the Terentian style that a theory resembling that of an ingenious American, Mr. Donnelly, concerning Shakespeare and Bacon was actually broached in the ancient world about Terence, who was said to have been chosen by Laelius, and even Seipio himself, as the vehicle through which their clever comments on society should be presented to the world. The refinement of Terence is certainly very marked. Naevius, for instance, makes a son frankly and brutally pray for the death of his parents: —

How different is the tone of Ctesiplio in the Adelphi! —

Even the modern world has something to learn from the cultured African. Moliere, in his École des Mans, restores the Nævian brutality of the passage to which I have referred, and Jonas Chuzzlewit complains that his father, in living so long, is fiying in the face of the Scriptures. The very refinement of Terence has, in the minds of some critics, been prejudicial to his fame. An ingenious German, M. Meyer, thinks that Terence was spoiled by the patronage of Seipio and Lælius. His life was too easy and luxurious. The pampered freedman lost his powers of observation, and described a society such as existed only in his own enervated imagination. The atri um is transported into Arcadia, and one might suppose it was the reign of Numa or Evander. It is, however, very doubtful whether an observer of society does not see better from above than from below, and it is a barren kind of criticism which, instead of asking what were the powers of the dramatist as revealed in his work, pursues rather the inquiry what his circumstances ought to have made them.

We are told that the aediles had the right of refusing or accepting plays. There seems always to have been some one to whom they referred the matter, and who did the part of the lord chamberlain in England. Tarpa was the referee in Cicero’s time, as we learn from a letter of Cicero to Marius. Larcius of Lanuvium seems to have discharged the same function in the time of Terence, and to have regarded his young rival with jealousy, and accused him of plagiarism. The answer of the Batin dramatist is characteristic. He declares he has not used the works of his Batin predecessors. He does not even know them. He claims for himself the merit of complete originality, because he has taken his plays solely (and wholly) from the Greek.

A well-known story records what a generous critic of his Andria Terence found in Ciecilius, who certainly had not much in common with "Terence, and rather exaggerated than modified the coarseness of Plautus. Cæcilius makes a son say that it gives piquancy to an intrigue if one’s father is a bear and a miser ; it is no fun if he is generous and kind; and he makes a husband say of his wife, —

Other coarse and disgusting fragments express brutally that indifference to his wife which the Plautine husband thought it humorous to dwell on. But we can forgive Cæcilius much when we meet our old familiar gallery claptrap sentiment that

Afranius, the chief of the writers of the so-called togatœ, is the poet most frequently quoted next after Plautus and Terence. Unlike Terence, he confesses that he draws on the Latin as well as the Greek drama, and of Terence he declares that he has no second, and that every word of his is genuine wit. Cicero ascribes to him that thorough knowledge of human life which was so completely the appanage of Menander that a wellknown verse declared it was hard to say whether the poet copied life, or life the poet. This is, perhaps, the meaning of the Horatian remark that the toga of Afranius fitted Menander. It is in his refined and tender view of the relation of father and gon that Afranius most resembles Terence. A father in the Adelphi welcomes the faintest sign of grace in his son, and exclaims, —

So, in Afranius, when a son cries, “ Miserable wretch that I am ! ” the father comforts himself with the reflection that if his sou expresses regret his shortcomings are more than half atoned for ; and he, like Terence, condemns those fathers who seek "to inspire their sons with fear rather than respect.”

After Afranius, Latin comedy merged into the tabemaria, then the mime, then the revived Atellan play, which ultimately itself gave way to the mime again under the Empire. The remark of the judicious Quintilian, already quoted, makes it hard to feel sure that fortune, which has given us only fragments of tragedy, has done the best for us in sparing so many comedies; but of one source of congratulation, at least, we may feel pretty certain, — the portion of comedy which has survived is surely the fittest.