oduction of them, as a Roman equivalent
for the Homeric games, in the fifth Aeneid, on the anniversary of the
funeral of Anchises. Virgil has naturally omitted the gladiators; but
long before his time it had become common to use the opportunity of
the funeral of a relation to give munera for the purpose of gaining
popularity.[496] A good example is that of young Curio, who in 53 B.C.
ruined himself in this way. Cicero alludes to this in an interesting
letter to Curio.[497] "You may reach the highest honours," he says,
"more easily by your natural advantages of character, diligence, and
fortune, than by gladiatorial exhibitions. The power of giving them
stirs no feeling of admiration in any one: it is a question of means
and not of character: and there is no one who is not by this time
sick and tired of them." To Cicero's refined mind they were naturally
repugnant; but young men like Curio, though they loved Cicero, were
not wont to follow his wholesome advice.[498]

We turn now to the dramatic element in the ludi, chiefly with the
object of determining whether, in the age of Cicero, it was of any
real importance in the social life of the Roman people. The Roman
stage had had a great history before the last century B.C., into which
it is not necessary here to enter. It had always been possible without
difficulty for those who were responsible for the ludi to put on
the stage a tragedy or comedy either written for the occasion or
reproduced, with competent actors and the necessary music; and there
seems to be no doubt that both tragedies and comedies, whether adapted
from the Greek (fabulae palliatae) or of a national character (fab.
togatae), were enjoyed by the audiences. In the days of the Punic wars
and afterwards, when everything Greek was popular, a Roman audience
could appreciate stories of the Greek mythology, as presented in the
tragedies of Ennius, Pacuvius, and Accius, if without learning to read
in them the great problems of human life, at least as spectacles of
the vicissitudes of human fortune; and had occasionally listened to a
tragedy, or perhaps father a dramatic history, based on some familiar
legend of their own State. And the conditions of social life in Rome
and Athens were not so different but that in the hands of a real
genius like Plautus the New Athenian comedy could come home to the
Roman people, with their delight in rather rough fun and comical
situations: and Plautus was followed by Caecilius