taken from the originals. The first and only influential
tragedian of this epoch was the younger contemporary of Naevius
and Plautus, Quintus Ennius (515-585), whose pieces were already
travestied by contemporary comic writers, and were exhibited and
declaimed by posterity down to the days of the empire.

The tragic drama of the Romans is far less known to us than the comic:
on the whole the same features, which have been noticed in the case of
comedy, are presented by tragedy also. The dramatic stock, in like
manner, was mainly formed by translations of Greek pieces. The
preference was given to subjects derived from the siege of Troy and
the legends immediately connected with it, evidently because this
cycle of myths alone was familiar to the Roman public through
instruction at school; by their side incidents of striking horror
predominate, such as matricide or infanticide in the -Eumenides-,
the -Alcmaeon-, the -Cresphontes-, the -Melanippe-, the -Medea-, and
the immolation of virgins in the -Polyxena-, the -Erechthides-, the
-Andromeda-, the -Iphigenia- --we cannot avoid recalling the fact,
that the public for which these tragedies were prepared was in the
habit of witnessing gladiatorial games. The female characters and
ghosts appear to have made the deepest impression. In addition to the
rejection of masks, the most remarkable deviation of the Roman edition
from the original related to the chorus. The Roman theatre, fitted up
doubtless in the first instance for comic plays without chorus, had
not the special dancing-stage (-orchestra-) with the altar in the
middle, on which the Greek chorus performed its part, or, to speak
more correctly, the space thus appropriated among the Greeks served
with the Romans as a sort of pit; accordingly the choral dance at
least, with its artistic alternations and intermixture of music and
declamation, must have been omitted in Rome, and, even if the chorus
was retained, it had but little importance. Of course there were
various alterations of detail, changes in the metres, curtailments,
and disfigurements; in the Latin edition of the -Iphigenia- of
Euripides, for instance, the chorus of women was--either after the
model of another tragedy, or by the editor's own device--converted
into a chorus of soldiers. The Latin tragedies of the sixth century
cannot be pronounced good translations in our sense of the word;(41)
yet it is probable that a tragedy of Ennius gave a far less i