But, while the government did not allow the Roman comedian to depict
the state of things in his native city or to bring his fellow-citizens
on the stage, a national Latin comedy was not absolutely precluded
from springing up; for the Roman burgesses at this period were not yet
identified with the Latin nation, and the poet was at liberty to lay
the plot of his pieces in the Italian towns of Latin rights just as
in Athens or Massilia. In this way, in fact, the Latin original
comedy arose (-fabula togata- (35)): the earliest known composer
of such pieces, Titinius, flourished probably about the close of
this period.(36)

This comedy was also based on the new Attic intrigue-piece; it was
not translation, however, but imitation; the scene of the piece lay
in Italy, and the actors appeared in the national dress,(37) the
-toga-. Here the Latin life and doings were brought out with peculiar
freshness. The pieces delineate the civil life of the middle-sized
towns of Latium; the very titles, such as -Psaltria- or -Ferentinatis-
, -Tibicina-, -Iurisperita-, -Fullones-, indicate this; and many
particular incidents, such as that of the townsman who has his shoes
made after the model of the 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superseded by the -Frauenzimmerchen- Franziska, so the Latin national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 th