in the Atellana, on the portraiture of the manners of common and low life; in which rural pictures are laid aside for those of the life and doings of the capital, and the sweet rabble of Rome—­ just as in the similar Greek pieces the rabble of Alexandria—­ is summoned to applaud its own likeness.  Many subjects are taken from the life of tradesmen; there appear the—­ here also inevitable—­“Fuller,” then the “Ropemaker,” the “Dyer,” the “Salt-man,” the “Female Weavers,” the “Rascal”; other pieces give sketches of character, as the “Forgetful,” the “Braggart,” the “Man of 100,000 sesterces";(10) or pictures of other lands, the “Etruscan Woman,” the “Gauls,” the “Cretan,” “Alexandria”; or descriptions of popular festivals, as the “Compitalia,” the “Saturnalia,” “Anna Perenna,” the “Hot Baths”; or parodies of mythology, as the “Voyage to the Underworld,” the “Arvernian Lake.”  Apt nicknames and short commonplaces which were easily retained and applied were welcome; but every piece of nonsense was of itself privileged; in this preposterous world Bacchus is applied to for water and the fountain-nymph for wine.  Isolated examples even of the political allusions formerly so strictly prohibited in the Roman theatre are found in these mimes.(11) As regards metrical form, these poets gave themselves, as they tell us, “but moderate trouble with the versification”; the language abounded, even in the pieces prepared for publication, with vulgar expressions and low newly-coined words.  The mime was, it is plain, in substance nothing but the former farce; with this exception, that the character-masks and the standing scenery of Atella as well as the rustic impress are dropped, and in their room the life of the capital in its boundless liberty and licence is brought on the stage.  Most pieces of this sort were doubtless of a very fugitive nature and made no pretension to a place in literature; but the mimes of Laberius, full of pungent delineation of character and in point of language and metre exhibiting the hand of a master, maintained their ground in it; and even the historian must regret that we are no longer permitted to compare the drama of the republican death-struggle in Rome with its great Attic counterpart.

Dramatic Spectacles

With the worthlessness of dramatic literature the increase of scenic spectacles and of scenic pomp went hand in hand.  Dramatic representations obtained their regular place in the public life not only of the capital but also of the country towns; the former also now at length acquired by means of Pompeius a permanent theatre (699;(12)), and the Campanian custom of stretching canvas over the theatre for the protection of the actors and spectators during the performance, which in ancient times always took place in the open air, now likewise found admission to Rome (676).  As at that time in Greece it was not the—­more than pale-Pleiad of the Alexandrian dramatists, but the classic drama, above all the tragedies of Euripides,