gods and heroes.

Recitative Poetry

Recitative poetry also took its rise during this epoch at Rome.
Livius naturalized the custom which among the ancients held the
place of our modern publication--the public reading of new works by
the author--in Rome, at least to the extent of reciting them in his
school. As poetry was not in this instance practised with a view to
a livelihood, or at any rate not directly so, this branch of it was
not regarded by public opinion with such disfavour as writing for the
stage: towards the end of this epoch one or two Romans of quality had
publicly come forward in this manner as poets.(51) Recitative poetry
however was chiefly cultivated by those poets who occupied themselves
with writing for the stage, and the former held a subordinate place as
compared with the latter; in fact, a public to which read poetry might
address itself can have existed only to a very limited extent at this
period in Rome.

Satura

Above all, lyrical, didactic, and epigrammatic poetry found but feeble
representation. The religious festival chants--as to which the annals
of this period certainly have already thought it worth while to
mention the author--as well as the monumental inscriptions on temples
and tombs, for which the Saturnian remained the regular measure,
hardly belong to literature proper. So far as the minor poetry makes
its appearance at all, it presents itself ordinarily, and that as
early as the time of Naevius, under the name of -satura-. This term
was originally applied to the old stage-poem without action, which
from the time of Livius was driven off the stage by the Greek drama;
but in its application to recitative poetry it corresponds in some
measure to our "miscellaneous poems," and like the latter denotes not
any positive species or style of art, but simply poems not of an epic
or dramatic kind, treating of any matters (mostly subjective), and
written in any form, at the pleasure of the author. In addition to
Cato's "poem on Morals" to be noticed afterwards, which was presumably
written in Saturnian verses after the precedent of the older first
attempts at a national didactic poetry,(52) there came under this
category especially the minor poems of Ennius, which that writer,
who was very fertile in this department, published partly in his
collection of -saturae-, partly separately. Among these were brief
narrative poems relating to the legendary or contemporary history of
his co