contemporary of Andronicus--his poetical
activity began considerably before, and probably did not end till
after, the Hannibalic war--and felt in a general sense his influence;
he was, as is usually the case in artificial literatures, a worker in
all the forms of art produced by his predecessor, in epos, tragedy,
and comedy, and closely adhered to him in the matter of metres.
Nevertheless, an immense chasm separates the poets and their poems.
Naevius was neither freedman, schoolmaster, nor actor, but a citizen
of unstained character although not of rank, belonging probably to one
of the Latin communities of Campania, and a soldier in the first Punic
war.(28) In thorough contrast to the language of Livius, that of
Naevius is easy and clear, free from all stiffness and affectation,
and seems even in tragedy to avoid pathos as it were on purpose; his
verses, in spite of the not unfrequent -hiatus- and various other
licences afterwards disallowed, have a smooth and graceful flow.(29)
While the quasi-poetry of Livius proceeded, somewhat like that of
Gottsched in Germany, from purely external impulses and moved wholly
in the leading-strings of the Greeks, his successor emancipated Roman
poetry, and with the true divining-rod of the poet struck those
springs out of which alone in Italy a native poetry could well up
--national history and comedy. Epic poetry no longer merely
furnished the schoolmaster with a lesson-book, but addressed itself
independently to the hearing and reading public. Composing for the
stage had been hitherto, like the preparation of the stage costume, a
subsidiary employment of the actor or a mechanical service performed
for him; with Naevius the relation was inverted, and the actor now
became the servant of the composer. His poetical activity is marked
throughout by a national stamp. This stamp is most distinctly
impressed on his grave national drama and on his national epos, of
which we shall have to speak hereafter; but it also appears in his
comedies, which of all his poetic performances seem to have been the
best adapted to his talents and the most successful. It was probably,
as we have already said,(30) external considerations alone that
induced the poet to adhere in comedy so much as he did to the Greek
originals; and this did not prevent him from far outstripping his
successors and probably even the insipid originals in the freshness of
his mirth and in the fulness of his living interest in