ith flute-playing, choirs of dancers, tragedians, and
athletes, and eventually convert it into a boxing-match;(27) and in
presence of a public which, as later poets complain, ran away en masse
from the play, if there were pugilists, or rope-dancers, or even
gladiators to be seen; poets such as the Roman composers were--workers
for hire and of inferior social position--were obliged even perhaps
against their own better judgment and their own better taste to
accommodate themselves more or less to the prevailing frivolity and
rudeness. It was quite possible, nevertheless, that there might arise
among them individuals of lively and vigorous talent, who were able at
least to repress the foreign and factitious element in poetry, and,
when they had found their fitting sphere, to produce pleasing and
even important creations.

Naevius

At the head of these stood Gnaeus Naevius, the first Roman who
deserves to be called a poet, and, so far as the accounts preserved
regarding him and the few fragments of his works allow us to form
an opinion, to all appearance as regards talent one of the most
remarkable and most important names in the whole range of Roman
literature. He was a younger 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