The history of Rome

11. The close and original connection, which Livy in particular represents as subsisting between the Atellan farce and the Saturawith the drama thence developed, is not at all tenable. The difference between the histrio and the Atellan player was just about as great as is at present the difference between a professional actor and a man who goes to a masked ball; between the dramatic piece, which down to Terence's time had no masks, and the Atellan, which was essentially based on the character-mask, there subsisted an original distinction in no way to be effaced. The drama arose out of the flute-piece, which at first without any recitation was confined merely to song and dance, then acquired a text (Satura), and lastly obtained through Andronicus a libretto borrowed from the Greek stage, in which the old flute-lays occupied nearly the place of the Greek chorus. This course of development nowhere in its earlier stages comes into contact with the farce, which was performed by amateurs.

12. In the time of the empire the Atellana was represented by professional actors (Friedlander in Becker's Handbuch. vi. 549). The time at which these began to engage in it is not reported, but it can hardly have been other than the time at which the Atellan was admitted among the regular stage-plays, i. e. the epoch before Cicero (Cic. ad Fam. ix. 16). This view is not inconsistent with the circumstance that still in Livy's time (vii. 2) the Atellan players retained their honorary rights as contrasted with other actors; for the statement that professional actors began to take part in performing the Atellana for pay does not imply that the Atellana was no longer performed, in the country towns for instance, by unpaid amateurs, and the privilege therefore still remained applicable.

13. It deserves attention that the Greek farce was not only especially at home in Lower Italy, but that several of its pieces (e. g. among those of Sopater, the 'Lentile-Porridge', the 'Wooers of Bacchis', the 'Valet of Mystakos', the 'Bookworms', the 'Physiologist') strikingly remind us of the Atellanae. This composition of farces must have reached down to the time at which the Greeks in and around Neapolis formed a circle enclosed within the Latin-speaking Campania; for one of these writers of farces, Blaesus of Capreae, bears even a Roman name and wrote a farce 'Saturnus.'

14. According to Eusebius, Pomponius flourished about 664; Velleius calls him a contemporary of Lucius Crassus (614-663) and Marcus Antonius (611-667). The former statement is probably about a generation too late; the reckoning by victoriati (p. 182) which was discontinued about 650 still occurs in his Pictores, and about the end of this period we already meet the mimes which displaced the Atellanae from the stage.

15. It was probably merry enough in this form. In the Phoenissae of Novius, for instance, there was the line: Sume arma, iam te occidam clava scirpea, Just as Menander's Pseudeirakleis makes his appearance.

16. Hitherto the person providing the play had been obliged to fit up the stage and scenic apparatus out of the round sum assigned to him or at his own expense, and probably much money would not often be expended on these. But in 580 the censors made the erection of the stage for the games of the praetors and aediles a matter of special contract (Liv. xli. 27); the circumstance that the stage-apparatus was now no longer erected merely for a single performance must have led to a perceptible improvement of it.

17. The attention given to the acoustic arrangements of the Greeks may be inferred from Vitruv. v. 5, 8. Ritschl (Parerg. i. 227, xx.) has discussed the question of the seats; but it is probable (according to Plautus, Capt. prol. 11) that those only who were not capite censi had a claim to a seat. It is probable, moreover, that the words of Horace that 'captive Greece led captive her conqueror' primarily refer to these epoch-making theatrical games of Mummius (Tac. Ann. xiv. 21).

18. The scenery of Pulcher must have been regularly painted, since the birds are said to have attempted to perch on the tiles (Plin. H. N. xxxv. 4, 23; Val. Max. ii. 4, 6). Hitherto the machinery for thunder had consisted in the shaking of nails and stones in a copper kettle; Pulcher first produced a better thunder by rolling stones, which was thenceforth named 'Claudian thunder' (Festus, v. Claudiana, p. 57).

19. Among the few minor poems preserved from this epoch there occurs the following epigram on this illustrious actor: Constiteram, exorientem Auroram forte salutans, Cum subito a laeva Roscius exoritur. Pace mihi liceat, coelestes, dicere vestra; Mortalis visust pulchrior esse deo.

The author of this epigram, Greek in its tone and inspired by Greek enthusiasm for art, was no less a man than the conqueror of the Cimbri, Quintus Lutatius Catulus, consul in 652.

20. IV. XII. Course of Literature and Rhetoric.

21. Quam lepide - legeis - compostae ut tesserulae omnes Arte pavimento atque emblemate vermiculato.

22. The poet advises him

Quo facetior videare et scire plus quant ceteri - to say not pertaesum but pertisum.

23. IV. III. Its Suspension by Scipio Aemilianus.

24. The following longer fragment is a characteristic specimen of the style and metrical treatment, the loose structure of which cannot possibly be reproduced in German hexameters:

Virtus, Albine, est pretium persolvere verum
Queis in versamur, queis vivimu' rebu' potesse;
Virtus est homini scire quo quaeque habeat res;
Virtus scire homini rectum, utile, quid sit honestum,
Quae bona, quae mala item, quid inutile, turpe, inhonestum;