performances
taking place by day made no pretension to acting properly so called,
employed men to represent female characters, and absolutely required
an artificial strengthening of the voice of the actor--was entirely
dependent, in a scenic as well as acoustic point of view, on the use
of facial and resonant masks. These were well known also in Rome; in
amateur performances the players appeared without exception masked.
But the actors who were to perform the Greek comedies in Rome were
not supplied with the masks--beyond doubt much more artificial--that
were necessary for them; a circumstance which, apart from all else in
connection with the defective acoustic arrangements of the stage,(26)
not only compelled the actor to exert his voice unduly, but drove
Livius to the highly inartistic but inevitable expedient of having
the portions which were to be sung performed by a singer not belonging
to the staff of actors, and accompanied by the mere dumb show of the
actor within whose part they fell. As little were the givers of the
Roman festivals disposed to put themselves to material expense for
decorations and machinery. The Attic stage regularly presented a
street with houses in the background, and had no shifting decorations;
but, besides various other apparatus, it possessed more especially
a contrivance for pushing forward on the chief stage a smaller one
representing the interior of a house. The Roman theatre, however, was
not provided with this; and we can hardly therefore throw the blame
on the poet, if everything, even childbirth, was represented on
the street.

Aesthetic Result

Such was the nature of the Roman comedy of the sixth century. The
mode in which the Greek dramas were transferred to Rome furnishes a
picture, historically invaluable, of the diversity in the culture
of the two nations; but in an aesthetic and a moral point of view the
original did not stand high, and the imitation stood still lower. The
world of beggarly rabble, to whatever extent the Roman editors might
take possession of it under the benefit of the inventory, presented
in Rome a forlorn and strange aspect, shorn as it were of its delicate
characteristics: comedy no longer rested on the basis of reality, but
persons and incidents seemed capriciously or carelessly mingled as in
a game of cards; in the original a picture from life, it became in the
reproduction a caricature. Under a management which could announce
a Greek agon w