as Lucius Caesar (aedile in 664, 667), engaged in writing for the Roman stage and proud of sitting in the Roman “poet’s club” by the side of the ancestorless Accius.  Art gains in sympathy and honour; but the enthusiasm has departed in life and in literature.  The fearless self-confidence, which makes the poet a poet, and which is very decidedly apparent in Plautus especially, is found in none of those that follow; the Epigoni of the men that fought with Hannibal are correct, but feeble.

Tragedy
Pacuvius

Let us first glance at the Roman dramatic literature and the stage itself.  Tragedy has now for the first time her specialists; the tragic poets of this epoch do not, like those of the preceding, cultivate comedy and epos side by side.  The appreciation of this branch of art among the writing and reading circles was evidently on the increase, but tragic poetry itself hardly improved.  We now meet with the national tragedy (-praetexta-), the creation of Naevius, only in the hands of Pacuvius to be mentioned immediately—­ an after-growth of the Ennian epoch.  Among the probably numerous poets who imitated Greek tragedies two alone acquired a considerable name.  Marcus Pacuvius from Brundisium (535-c. 625) who in his earlier years earned his livelihood in Rome by painting and only composed tragedies when advanced in life, belongs as respects both his years and his style to the sixth rather than the seventh century, although his poetical activity falls within the latter.  He composed on the whole after the manner of his countryman, uncle, and master Ennius.  Polishing more carefully and aspiring to a higher strain than his predecessor, he was regarded by favourable critics of art afterwards as a model of artistic poetry and of rich style:  in the fragments, however, that have reached us proofs are not wanting to justify the censure of the poet’s language by Cicero and the censure of his taste by Lucilius; his language appears more rugged than that of his predecessor, his style of composition pompous and punctilious.(1) There are traces that he like Ennius attached more value to philosophy than to religion; but he did not at any rate, like the latter, prefer dramas chiming in with neological views and preaching sensuous passion or modern enlightenment, and drew without distinction from Sophocles or from Euripides—­of that poetry with a decided special aim, which almost stamps Ennius with genius, there can have been no vein in the younger poet.

Accius

More readable and adroit imitations of Greek tragedy were furnished by Pacuvius’ younger contemporary, Lucius Accius, son of a freedman of Pisaurum (584-after 651), with the exception of Pacuvius the only notable tragic poet of the seventh century.  An active author also in the field of literary history and grammar, he doubtless laboured to introduce instead of the crude manner of his predecessors greater purity of language and style into Latin tragedy; yet even his inequality and incorrectness were emphatically censured by men of strict observance like Lucilius.