few such strokes of genius as the creation of a Roman national drama.  Only the Greek tragedians of that earliest period which still felt itself nearer to the gods —­only poets like Phrynichus and Aeschylus—­had the courage to bring the great deeds which they had witnessed, and in which they had borne a part, on the stage by the side of those of legendary times; and here, if anywhere, we are enabled vividly to realize what the Punic wars were and how powerful was their effect, when we find a poet, who like Aeschylus had himself fought in the battles which he sang, introducing the kings and consuls of Rome upon that stage on which men had hitherto been accustomed to see none but 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