ana 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