which he answered by an enumeration of political sins, such as:
But the Roman police was not disposed like the Attic to hold stage-invectives and political diatribes as privileged, or even to tolerate them at all. Naevius was put in prison for these and similar sallies, and was obliged to remain there, till he had publicly made amends and recantation in other comedies. These quarrels, apparently, drove him from his native land; but his successors took warning from his example - one of them indicates very plainly, that he has no desire whatever to incur an involuntary gagging like his colleague Naevius. Thus the result was accomplished - not much less unique of its kind than the conquest of Hannibal - that, during an epoch of the most feverish national excitement, there arose a national stage utterly destitute of political tinge.
But the restrictions thus stringently and laboriously imposed by custom and police on Roman poetry stifled its very breath, Not without reason might Naevius declare the position of the poet under the sceptre of the Lagidae and Seleucidae enviable as compared with his position in free Rome[23]. The degree of success in individual instances was of course determined by the quality of the original which was followed, and by the talent of the individual editor; but amidst all their individual variety the whole stock of translations must have agreed in certain leading features, inasmuch as all the comedies were adapted to similar conditions of exhibition and a similar audience. The treatment of the whole as well as of the details was uniformly in the highest degree free; and it was necessary that it should be so. While the original pieces were performed in presence of that society which they copied, and in this very fact lay their principal charm, the Roman audience of this period was so different from the Attic, that it was not even in a position rightly to understand that foreign world. The Roman comprehended neither the grace and kindliness, nor the sentimentalism and the whitened emptiness of the domestic life of the Hellenes. The slave-world was utterly different; the Roman slave was a piece of household furniture, the Attic slave was a servant. Where marriages of slaves occur or a master carries on a kindly conversation with his slave, the Roman translators ask their audience not to take offence at such things which are usual in Athens[24]; and, when at a later period comedies began to be written in Roman costume, the part of the crafty servant had to be rejected, because the Roman public did not tolerate slaves of this sort overlooking and controlling their masters. The professional figures and those illustrative of character, which were sketched more broadly and farcically, bore the process of transference better than the polished figures of every-day life; but even of those delineations the Roman editor had to lay aside several - and these probably the very finest and most original, such as the Thais, the match-maker, the moon-conjuress, and the mendicant priest of Menander - and to keep chiefly to those foreign trades, with which the Greek luxury of the table, already very generally diffused in Rome, had made his audience familiar. If the professional cook and the jester in the comedy of Plautus are delineated with so striking vividness and so much relish, the explanation lies in the fact, that Greek cooks had even at that time daily offered their services in the Roman market, and that Cato found it necessary even to instruct his steward not to keep a jester. In like manner the translator could make no use of a very large portion of the elegant Attic conversation in his originals. The Roman citizen or farmer stood in much the same relation to the refined revelry and debauchery of Athens, as the German of a provincial town to the mysteries of the Palais Royal. A science of cookery, in the strict sense, never entered into his thoughts; the dinner-parties no doubt continued to be very numerous in the Roman imitation, but everywhere the plain Roman roast pork predominated over the variety of baked meats and the refined sauces and dishes of fish. Of the riddles and drinking songs, of the Greek rhetoric and philosophy, which played so great a part in the originals, we meet only a stray trace now and then in the Roman adaptation.
The havoc, which the Roman editors were compelled in deference to their audience to make in the originals, drove them inevitably into methods of cancelling and amalgamating incompatible with any artistic construction. It was usual not only to throw out whole character-parts of the original, but also to insert others taken from other comedies of the same or of another poet; a treatment indeed which, owing to the outwardly methodical construction of the originals and the recurrence of standing figures and incidents, was not quite so bad as it might seem. Moreover the poets, at least in the earlier period, allowed themselves the most singular liberties in the construction of the plot. The plot of the Stichus (performed in 554) otherwise so excellent turns upon the circumstance, that two sisters, whom their father urges to abandon their absent husbands, play the part of Penelopes, till the husbands return home with rich mercantile gains and with a beautiful damsel as a present for their father-in-law. In the Casina, which was received with quite special favour by the public, the bride, from whom the piece is named and around whom the plot revolves, does not make her appearance at all, and the denouement is quite naively described by the epilogue as "to be enacted later within". Very often the plot as it thickens is suddenly broken off, the connecting thread is allowed to drop, and other similar signs of an unfinished art appear. The reason of this is to be sought probably far less in the unskilfulness of the Roman editors, than in the indifference of the Roman public to aesthetic laws. Taste, however, gradually formed itself. In the later pieces Plautus has evidently bestowed more care on their construction, and the Captivi for instance, the Pseudolus, and the Bacchides are executed in a masterly manner after their kind. His successor Caecilius, none of whose pieces are extant, is said to have especially distinguished himself by the more artistic treatment of the subject.
In the treatment of details the endeavour of the poet to bring matters as far as possible home to his Roman hearers, and the rule of police which required that the pieces should retain a foreign character, produced the most singular contrasts. The Roman gods, the ritual, military, and juristic terms of the Romans, present a strange appearance amid the Greek world; Roman aediles and tresviri are grotesquely mingled with agoranomi and demarchi; pieces whose scene is laid in Aetolia or Epidamnus send the spectator without scruple to the Velabrum and the Capitol. Such a patchwork of Roman local tints distributed over the Greek ground is barbarism enough; but interpolations of this nature, which are often in their naive way very ludicrous, are far more tolerable than that thorough alteration of the pieces into a ruder shape, which the editors deemed necessary to suit the far from Attic culture of their audience. It is true that several even of the new Attic poets probably needed no accession to their coarseness; pieces like the Asinaria of Plautus cannot owe their unsurpassed dulness and vulgarity solely to the translator.
23. The remarkable passage in the
24. The ideas of the modern Hellas on the point of slavery are illustrated by the passage in Euripides (Ion, 854; comp. Helena, 728):