g fashion, to imitate the high artistic culture
of the neighbouring people. The wide deviations from the original
have arisen not from the freedom, but from the rudeness of the
imitation; the treatment is sometimes insipid, sometimes turgid, the
language harsh and quaint.(9) We have no difficulty in believing the
statement of the old critics of art, that, apart from the compulsory
reading at school, none of the poems of Livius were taken up a second
time. Yet these labours were in various respects norms for succeeding
times. They began the Roman translated literature, and naturalized
the Greek metres in Latium. The reason why these were adopted only
in the dramas, while the Odyssey of Livius was written in the national
Saturnian measure, evidently was that the iambuses and trochees of
tragedy and comedy far more easily admitted of imitation in Latin
than the epic dactyls.

But this preliminary stage of literary development was soon passed.
The epics and dramas of Livius were regarded by posterity, and
undoubtedly with perfect justice, as resembling the rigid statues
of Daedalus destitute of emotion or expression--curiosities rather
than works of art.

But in the following generation, now that the foundations were
once laid, there arose a lyric, epic, and dramatic art; and it is
of great importance, even in a historical point of view, to trace
this poetical development.

Drama
Theatre

Both as respects extent of production and influence over the public,
the drama stood at the head of the poetry thus developed in Rome. In
antiquity there was no permanent theatre with fixed admission-money;
in Greece as in Rome the drama made its appearance only as an element
in the annually-recurring or extraordinary amusements of the citizens.
Among the measures by which the government counteracted or imagined
that they counteracted that extension of the popular festivals which
they justly regarded with anxiety, they refused to permit the erection
of a stone building for a theatre.(10) Instead of this there was
erected for each festival a scaffolding of boards with a stage for
the actors (-proscaenium-, -pulpitum-) and a decorated background
(-scaena-); and in a semicircle in front of it was staked off the
space for the spectators (-cavea-), which was merely sloped without
steps or seats, so that, if the spectators had not chairs brought
along with them, they squatted, reclined, or stood.(11) The women
were probably separa