The History of Rome, Book III eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 707 pages of information about The History of Rome, Book III.

The History of Rome, Book III eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 707 pages of information about The History of Rome, Book III.

Or the famous words, which in the -Hector Profisciscens- Hector addresses to Priam: 

-Laetus sum laudari me abs te, pater, a laudato viro;-

and the charming verse from the -Tarentilla-; —­

-Alii adnutat, alii adnictat; alium amat, alium tenet.-

30.  III.  XIV.  Political Neutrality

31.  III.  XIV.  Political Neutrality

32.  This hypothesis appears necessary, because otherwise the ancients could not have hesitated in the way they did as to the genuineness or spuriousness of the pieces of Plautus:  in the case of no author, properly so called, of Roman antiquity, do we find anything like a similar uncertainty as to his literary property.  In this respect, as in so many other external points, there exists the most remarkable analogy between Plautus and Shakespeare.

33.  III.  III.  The Celts Conquered by Rome, iii.  VII.  Measures Adopted to Check the Immigration of the Trans-Alpine Gauls

34.  III.  XIV.  Roman Barbarism

35 -Togatus- denotes, in juristic and generally in technical language, the Italian in contradistinction not merely to the foreigner, but also to the Roman burgess.  Thus especially -formula togatorum- (Corp.  Inscr.  Lat., I. n. 200, v. 21, 50) is the list of those Italians bound to render military serviee, who do not serve in the legions.  The designation also of Cisalpine Gaul as -Gallia togata-, which first occurs in Hirtius and not long after disappears again from the ordinary -usus loquendi-, describes this region presumably according to its legal position, in so far as in the epoch from 665 to 705 the great majority of its communities possessed Latin rights.  Virgil appears likewise in the -gens togata-, which he mentions along with the Romans (Aen. i. 282), to have thought of the Latin nation.

According to this view we shall have to recognize in the -fabula togata-the comedy which laid its plot in Latium, as the -fabula palliata- had its plot in Greece; the transference of the scene of action to a foreign land is common to both, and the comic writer is wholly forbidden to bring on the stage the city or the burgesses of Rome.  That in reality the -togata- could only have its plot laid in the towns of Latin rights, is shown by the fact that all the towns in which, to our knowledge, pieces of Titinius and Afranius had their scene—­Setia, Ferentinum, Velitrae, Brundisium,—­demonstrably had Latin or, at any rate, allied rights down to the Social war.  By the extension of the franchise to all Italy the writers of comedy lost this Latin localisation for their pieces, for Cisalpine Gaul, which -de jure- took the place of the Latin communities, lay too far off for the dramatists of the capital, and so the -fabula togata- seems in fact to have disappeared.  But the -de jure- suppressed communities of Italy, such as Capua and Atella, stepped into this gap (ii. 366, iii. 148), and so far the -fabula Atellana- was in some measure the continuation of the -togata-.

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The History of Rome, Book III from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.