who was originally a slave, acquired this name with his freedom, having been at first called by the servile appellation of [pg 169]Statius286. He was a native of Milan, and flourished towards the end of the sixth century of Rome, having survived Ennius, whose intimate friend he was, about one year, which places his death in 586. We learn from the prologue to the Hecyra of Terence, spoken in the person of Ambivius, the principal actor, or rather manager of the theatre, that, when he first brought out the plays of Cæcilius, some were hissed off the stage, and others hardly stood their ground; but knowing the fluctuating fortunes of dramatic exhibitions, he had again attempted to bring them forward. His perseverance having obtained for them a full and unprejudiced hearing, they failed not to please; and this success excited the author to new efforts in the poetic art, which he had nearly abandoned in a fit of despondency. The comedies of Cæcilius, which amounted to thirty, are all lost, so that our opinion of their merits can be formed only from the criticisms of those Latin authors who wrote before they had perished. Cicero blames the improprieties of his style and language287. From Horace’s Epistle to Augustus, we may collect what was the popular sentiment concerning Cæcilius—
It is not easy to see how a comic author could be more grave than Terence; and the quality applied to a writer of this cast appears of rather difficult interpretation. But the opinion which had been long before given by Varro affords a sort of commentary on Horace’s expression—“In argumentis,” says he, “Cæcilius palmam poscit; in ethesi Terentius.” By gravitas, therefore, as applied to Cæcilius, we may properly enough understand the grave and affecting plots of his comedies; which is farther confirmed by what Varro elsewhere observes of him—“Pathe Trabea, Attilius, et Cæcilius facile moverunt.” Velleius Paterculus joins him with Terence and Afranius, whom he reckons the most excellent comic writers of Rome—“Dulcesque Latini leporis facetiæ per Cæcilium, Terentiumque, et Afranium, sub pari ætate, nituerunt288.”
A great many of the plays of Cæcilius were taken from Menander; and Aulus Gellius informs us that they seemed agreeable and pleasing enough, till, being compared with their Greek models, they appeared quite tame and disgusting, and the wit of the original, which they were unable to imitate,[pg 170] totally vanished289. He accordingly contrasts a scene in the Plocius (or Necklace,) of Cæcilius, with the corresponding scene in Menander, and pronounces them to be as different in brightness and value as the arms of Diomed and Glaucus. The scenes compared are those where an old husband complains that his wife, who was rich and ugly, had obliged him to sell a handsome female slave, of whom she was jealous. This chapter of Aulus Gellius is very curious, as it gives us a more perfect notion than we obtain from any other writer, of the mode in which the Latin comic poets copied the Greeks. To judge from this single comparison, it appears that though the Roman dramatists imitated the incidents, and caught the ideas of their great masters, their productions were not entirely translations or slavish versions: A different turn is frequently given to a thought—the sentiments are often differently expressed, and sometimes much is curtailed, or altogether omitted.
though he chose Roman subjects, whence his comedies were called Togatæ, was an imitator of the manner of Menander—
Indeed he himself admits, in his Compitales, that he derived many even of his plots from Menander and other Greek writers—
Cicero290 calls Afranius an ingenious and eloquent writer. Ausonius, in one of his epigrams, talks “facundi Afrani.” He is also praised by Quintilian, who censures him, however, for the flagitious amours which he represented on the stage291, on account of which, perhaps, his writings were condemned to[pg 171] the flames by Pope Gregory I. The titles of forty-six of his plays have been collected by Fabricius, and a few fragments have been edited by Stephens. One of these, in the play entitled Sella, where it is said that wisdom is the child of experience and memory, has been commended by Aulus Gellius, and is plausibly conjectured292 to have been introduced in a prologue spoken in the person of Wisdom herself—
The following lines from the Vopiscum have also been frequently quoted:
also a follower of Menander, was the contemporary and enemy of Terence, who, in his prologues, has satirized his injudicious translations from the Greek—
In particular, we learn from the prologue to the Phormio, that he was fond of bringing on the stage frantic youths, committing all those excesses of folly and distraction which are supposed to be produced by violent love. Donatus has afforded us an account of the plot of his Phasma, which was taken from Menander. A lady, who, before marriage, had a daughter, the fruit of a secret amour with a person now living in a house adjacent to her husband’s, made an opening in the wall of her own dwelling, in order to communicate with that in which her former paramour and daughter resided. That this entrance might appear a consecrated spot to her husband’s family, she decked it with garlands, and shaded it with branches of trees. To this passage she daily repaired as if to pay her devotions, but in fact, to procure interviews with her [pg 172]illegitimate daughter. Her husband also had, by a former wife, a son, who dwelt in his father’s house, and who, having one day accidentally peeped through the aperture, beheld the girl; and, as she was possessed of almost supernatural beauty, he was struck with awe, as at the sight of a Spirit or divinity, whence the play received the name of Phasma. The young man, discovering at length that she is a mortal, conceives for her a violent passion, and is finally united to her, with the consent of his father, and to the great satisfaction of the mother. There is another play of Menander, which has also been closely imitated by Luscius Lavinius. Plautus, we have seen, borrowed his Trinummus from the Thesaurus of Philemon. But Menander also wrote a Thesaurus, which has been copied by Lavinius. An old man, by his last will, had commanded, that, ten years after his death, his son should carry libations to the monument under which he was to be interred. The youth, having squandered his fortune, sold the ground on which this monument stood to an old miser. At the end of ten years, the prodigal sent a servant to the tomb with due offerings, according to the injunctions of his deceased father. The servant applied to the new proprietor to assist him in opening the monument, in which they discovered a hoard of gold. The miserly owner of the soil seized the treasure, and retained it on pretence of having deposited it there for safety during a period of public commotion. It is claimed, however, by the young man, who goes to law with him; and the plot of the comedy chiefly consists in the progress of the suit295—the dramatic management of which has been ridiculed by Terence, in the prologue to the Eunuchus, since, contrary to the custom and rules of all courts of justice, the author had introduced the defendant pleading his title to the treasure before the plaintiff had explained his pretensions, and entered on the grounds of his demand. Part of the old Scotch ballad, The Heir of Linne, has a curious resemblance to the plot of this play of Luscius Lavinius.
Turpilius, Trabea, and Attilius, were the names of comic writers who lived towards the end of the sixth and beginning of the seventh century, from the building of Rome. Of these, and other contemporary dramatists, it would now be difficult to say more than that their works have perished, and to repeat a few scattered incidental criticisms delivered by Varro or Cicero. To them probably may be attributed the Baccharia, Cæcus, Cornicularia, Parasitus, and innumerable other comedies, of which the names have been preserved by gramma[pg 173]rians. Of such works, once the favourites of the Roman stage, few memorials survive, and these only to be found separate and imperfect in the quotations of scholiasts. Sometimes from a single play numerous passages have been preserved; but they are so detached, that they neither give us any insight into the fable to which they appertain, nor enable us to pronounce on the excellence of the dramatic characters. In general, they comprise so small a portion of uninterrupted dialogue, that we can scarcely form a judgment even of the style and manner of the poet, or of the beauty of his versification. All that is now valuable in these fragments is a few brief moral maxims, and some examples of that vis comica, which consists in an ingenious and forcible turn of expression in the original language.
It is not difficult to account for the vast number of dramatic productions which we thus see were brought forward at Rome in the early ages of the Republic. There are two ways in which literature may be supported,—By the patronage of distinguished individuals, as it was in the time of Mæcenas and the age of Lorenzo de Medici; or, By the encouragement of a great literary public, as it is now rewarded in modern Europe. But, in Rome, literature as yet had not obtained the protection of an emperor or a favourite minister; and previous to the invention of printing, which alone could give extensive circulation to his productions, a poet could hardly gain a livelihood by any means, except by supplying popular entertainments for the stage. These were always liberally paid for by the Ædiles, or other directors of the public amusements. To this species of composition, accordingly, the poet directed his almost undivided attention; and a prodigious facility was afforded to his exertions by the inexhaustible dramatic stores which he found prepared for him in Greece.
The plays of Quintus Trabea, supposed to belong chiefly to the class called Togatæ, are frequently cited by the grammarians, and are mentioned with approbation by Cicero. He in particular commends the lines where this poet so agreeably describes the credulity and overweening satisfaction of a lover—
The name of Trabea was made use of in a well known deception practised on Joseph Scaliger by Muretus. Scaliger piqued himself on his faculty of distinguishing the characteristic styles of ancient writers. In order to entrap him, Muretus showed him some verses, pretending that he had received them from Germany, where they had been transcribed from an ancient MS. attributed to Q. Trabea—
Scaliger was so completely deceived, that he afterwards cited these verses, as lines from the play of Harpace, by Q. Trabea, in the first edition of his Commentary on Varro’s Dialogues De Re Rustica, in order to illustrate some obscure expression of his author—“Quis enim,” says he, “tam aversus a Musis, tamque humanitatis expers, qui horum publicatione offendatur.” Muretus, not content with this malicious trick, afterwards sent him some other verses, to which he affixed the name of Attius, expressing, but more diffusely, the same idea. Scaliger, in his next edition of Varro, published them, along with the former lines, as fragments from the Œnomaus, a tragedy by Attius, and a plagiarism from Trabea—observing, at the end of his note, “Fortasse de hoc nimis.” Muretus said nothing for two years; but, at the end of that period, he published a volume of his own Latin poems, and, along with them, under the title Afficta Trabeæ, both sets of verses which [pg 175]he had thus palmed on Scaliger for undoubted remnants of antiquity. The whole history of the imposture was fully disclosed in a note: Both poems, it was acknowledged, were versions of a fragment, attributed by some to Menander, and by others to Philemon, beginning,—Ει τα δακρυα ἡμιν, κ.τ.λ. They have been also translated into Latin by Naugerius298.
The progress of time, the ravages of war, and the intervention of a period of barbarism, which have deprived us of so many dramatic works of the Romans, have fortunately spared six plays of