e sandals of the Alban kings, tend to
confirm it. The female characters preponderate in a remarkable manner
over the male.(38) With genuine national pride the poet recalls
the great times of the Pyrrhic war, and looks down on his new
Latin neighbours,--

-Qui Obsce et Volsce fabulantur; nam Latine nesciunt.-

This comedy belongs to the stage of the capital quite as much as did
the Greek; but it was probably animated by something of that rustic
antagonism to the ways and the evils of a great town, which appeared
contemporaneously in Cato and afterwards in Varro. As in the German
comedy, which proceeded from the French in much the same way as the
Roman comedy from the Attic, the French Lisette was very soon
superseded by the -Frauenzimmerchen- Franziska, so the Latin national
comedy sprang up, if not with equal poetical power, at any rate with
the same tendency and perhaps with similar success, by the side of
the Hellenizing comedy of the capital.

Tragedies
Euripides

Greek tragedy as well as Greek comedy came in the course of this epoch
to Rome. It was a more valuable, and in a certain respect also an
easier, acquisition than comedy. The Greek and particularly the
Homeric epos, which was the basis of tragedy, was not unfamiliar
to the Romans, and was already interwoven with their own national
legends; and the susceptible foreigner found himself far more at home
in the ideal world of the heroic myths than in the fish-market of
Athens. Nevertheless tragedy also promoted, only with less abruptness
and less vulgarity, the anti-national and Hellenizing spirit; and in
this point of view it was a circumstance of the most decisive
importance, that the Greek tragic stage of this period was chiefly
under the sway of Euripides (274-348). This is not the place for a
thorough delineation of that remarkable man and of his still more
remarkable influence on his contemporaries and posterity; but the
intellectual movements of the later Greek and the Graeco-Roman epoch
were to so great an extent affected by him, that it is indispensable
to sketch at least the leading outlines of his character. Euripides
was one of those poets who raise poetry doubtless to a higher level,
but in this advance manifest far more the true sense of what ought to
be than the power of poetically creating it. The profound saying which
morally as well as poetically sums up all tragic art--that action is
passion--holds true no doubt also of ancient tr