Let us first glance at the Roman dramatic literature and the stage itself. Tragedy has now for the first time her specialists; the tragic poets of this epoch do not, like those of the preceding, cultivate comedy and epos side by side. The appreciation of this branch of art among the writing and reading circles was evidently on the increase, but tragic poetry itself hardly improved. We now meet with the national tragedy (praetexta), the creation of Naevius, only in the hands of Pacuvius to be mentioned immediately - an after-growth of the Ennian epoch. Among the probably numerous poets who imitated Greek tragedies two alone acquired a considerable name. Marcus Pacuvius from Brundisium (535-c. 625) who in his earlier years earned his livelihood in Rome by painting and only composed tragedies when advanced in life, belongs as respects both his years and his style to the sixth rather than the seventh century, although his poetical activity falls within the latter. He composed on the whole after the manner of his countryman, uncle, and master Ennius. Polishing more carefully and aspiring to a higher strain than his predecessor, he was regarded by favourable critics of art afterwards as a model of artistic poetry and of rich style: in the fragments, however, that have reached us proofs are not wanting to justify the censure of the poet's language by Cicero and the censure of his taste by Lucilius; his language appears more rugged than that of his predecessor, his style of composition pompous and punctilious[1]. There are traces that he like Ennius attached more value to philosophy than to religion; but he did not at any rate, like the latter, prefer dramas chiming in with neological views and preaching sensuous passion or modern enlightenment, and drew without distinction from Sophocles or from Euripides - of that poetry with a decided special aim, which almost stamps Ennius with genius, there can have been no vein in the younger poet.
More readable and adroit imitations of Greek tragedy were furnished by Pacuvius' younger contemporary, Lucius Accius, son of a freedman of Pisaurum (584-after 651), with the exception of Pacuvius the only notable tragic poet of the seventh century. An active author also in the field of literary history and grammar, he doubtless laboured to introduce instead of the crude manner of his predecessors greater purity of language and style into Latin tragedy; yet even his inequality and incorrectness were emphatically censured by men of strict observance like Lucilius.
Far greater activity and far more important results are apparent in the field of comedy. At the very commencement of this period a remarkable reaction set in against the sort of comedy hitherto prevalent and popular. Its representative Terentius (558-595) is one of the most interesting phenomena, in a historical point of view, in Roman literature. Born in Phoenician Africa, brought in early youth as a slave to Rome and there introduced to the Greek culture of the day, he seemed from the very first destined for the vocation of giving back to the new Attic comedy that cosmopolitan character, which in its adaptation to the Roman public under the rough hands of Naevius, Plautus, and their associates it had in some measure lost. Even in the selection and employment of models the contrast is apparent between him and that predecessor whom alone we can now compare with him. Plautus chooses his pieces from the whole range of the newer Attic comedy, and by no means disdains the livelier and more popular comedians, such as Philemon; Terence keeps almost exclusively to Menander, the most elegant, polished, and chaste of all the poets of the newer comedy. The method of working up several Greek pieces into one Latin is retained by Terence, because in fact from the state of the case it could not be avoided by the Roman editors; but it is handled with incomparably more skill and carefulness. The Plautine dialogue beyond doubt departed very frequently from its models; Terence boasts of the verbal adherence of his imitations to the originals, by which however we are not to understand a verbal translation in our sense.
1. Thus in the
And in another piece the hearers are expected to understand the following description
To which they naturally reply
Then follows the confession that the tortoise is referred to. Such enigmas, moreover, were not wanting even among the Attic tragedians, who on that account were often and sharply taken to task by the Middle Comedy.