resent.

From this and other passages we have abundant evidence that tragedies
were still acted; but Cicero nowhere in his correspondence, where we
might naturally have expected to find it, nor in his philosophical
works, gives us any idea of their educational or aesthetic influence
either on himself or others. He is constantly quoting the old plays,
especially the tragedies, and knows them very well: but he quotes them
almost invariably as literature only. Once or twice, as we shall see,
he recalls the gesture or utterance of a great actor, but as a rule he
is thinking of them as poetry rather than as plays. It may be noted
in this connexion that it was now becoming the fashion to write plays
without any immediate intention of bringing them on the stage. We read
with astonishment in a letter of Cicero to his brother Quintus, then
in Gaul, that the latter had taken to play-writing, and accomplished
four tragedies in sixteen days, and this apparently in the course of
the campaign.[503] One, the _Erigona_, was sent to his brother from
Britain, and lost on the way. We hear no more of these plays, and
have no reason to suppose that they were worthy to survive. No man of
literary eminence in that day wrote plays for acting, and in fact the
only person of note, so far as we know, who did so, was the younger
Cornelius Balbus, son of the intimate friend and secretary of Caesar.
This man wrote one in Latin about his journey to his native town
of Gades, had it put on the stage there, and shed tears during its
performance.[504]

When we hear of plays being written without being acted, and of
tragedies being made the occasion of expressing political opinions,
we may be pretty sure that the drama is in its nonage. An interesting
proof of the same tendency is to be found in the first book of the
_Ars Amatoria_ of Ovid, though it belongs to the age of Augustus. In
this book Ovid describes the various resorts in the city where the
youth may look out for his girl; and when he comes to the theatre,
draws a pretty picture of the ladies of taste and fashion crowding
thither,--but

Spectatum veniunt: veniunt spectentur ut ipsae.

And then, without a word about the play, or the smallest hint that he
or the ladies really cared about such things, he goes off into the
familiar story of the rape of the Sabine women, supposed to have taken
place when Romulus was holding his ludi.

It is curious, in view of what thus seems to be a flagging