12.  In the time of the empire the Atellana was represented by professional actors (Friedlander in Becker’s Handbuch. vi. 549).  The time at which these began to engage in it is not reported, but it can hardly have been other than the time at which the Atellan was admitted among the regular stage-plays, i. e. the epoch before Cicero (Cic. ad Fam. ix. 16).  This view is not inconsistent with the circumstance that still in Livy’s time (vii. 2) the Atellan players retained their honorary rights as contrasted with other actors; for the statement that professional actors began to take part in performing the Atellana for pay does not imply that the Atellana was no longer performed, in the country towns for instance, by unpaid amateurs, and the privilege therefore still remained applicable,

13.  It deserves attention that the Greek farce was not only especially at home in Lower Italy, but that several of its pieces (e. g. among those of Sopater, the “Lentile-Porridge,” the “Wooers of Bacchis,” the “Valet of Mystakos,” the “Bookworms,” the “Physiologist”) strikingly remind us of the Atellanae.  This composition of farces must have reached down to the time at which the Greeks in and around Neapolis formed a circle enclosed within the Latin-speaking Campania; for one of these writers of farces, Blaesus of Capreae, bears even a Roman name and wrote a farce “Saturnus.”

14.  According to Eusebius, Pomponius flourished about 664; Velleius calls him a contemporary of Lucius Crassus (614-663) and Marcus Antonius (611-667).  The former statement is probably about a generation too late; the reckoning by -victoriati- (p. 182) which was discontinued about 650 still occurs in his -Pictores-, and about the end of this period we already meet the mimes which displaced the Atellanae from the stage.

15.  It was probably merry enough in this form.  In the -Phoenissae- of Novius, for instance, there was the line:—­

-Sume arma, iam te occidam clava scirpea-, Just as Menander’s —­Pseudeirakleis—­ makes his appearance.

16.  Hitherto the person providing the play had been obliged to fit up the stage and scenic apparatus out of the round sum assigned to him or at his own expense, and probably much money would not often be expended on these.  But in 580 the censors made the erection of the stage for the games of the praetors and aediles a matter of special contract (Liv. xli. 27); the circumstance that the stage-apparatus was now no longer erected merely for a single performance must have led to a perceptible improvement of it.

17.  The attention given to the acoustic arrangements of the Greeks may be inferred from Vitruv. v. 5, 8.  Ritschl (Parerg. i. 227, xx.) has discussed the question of the seats; but it is probable (according to Plautus, Capt. prol. 11) that those only who were not -capite censi- had a claim to a seat.  It is probable, moreover, that the words of Horace that “captive Greece led captive her conqueror” primarily refer to these epoch-making theatrical games of Mummius (Tac.  Ann. xiv. 21).