to every one from Virgil’s skilful introduction of them, as a Roman equivalent for the Homeric games, in the fifth Aeneid, on the anniversary of the funeral of Anchises.  Virgil has naturally omitted the gladiators; but long before his time it had become common to use the opportunity of the funeral of a relation to give munera for the purpose of gaining popularity.[496] A good example is that of young Curio, who in 53 B.C. ruined himself in this way.  Cicero alludes to this in an interesting letter to Curio.[497] “You may reach the highest honours,” he says, “more easily by your natural advantages of character, diligence, and fortune, than by gladiatorial exhibitions.  The power of giving them stirs no feeling of admiration in any one:  it is a question of means and not of character:  and there is no one who is not by this time sick and tired of them.”  To Cicero’s refined mind they were naturally repugnant; but young men like Curio, though they loved Cicero, were not wont to follow his wholesome advice.[498]

We turn now to the dramatic element in the ludi, chiefly with the object of determining whether, in the age of Cicero, it was of any real importance in the social life of the Roman people.  The Roman stage had had a great history before the last century B.C., into which it is not necessary here to enter.  It had always been possible without difficulty for those who were responsible for the ludi to put on the stage a tragedy or comedy either written for the occasion or reproduced, with competent actors and the necessary music; and there seems to be no doubt that both tragedies and comedies, whether adapted from the Greek (fabulae palliatae) or of a national character (fab. togatae), were enjoyed by the audiences.  In the days of the Punic wars and afterwards, when everything Greek was popular, a Roman audience could appreciate stories of the Greek mythology, as presented in the tragedies of Ennius, Pacuvius, and Accius, if without learning to read in them the great problems of human life, at least as spectacles of the vicissitudes of human fortune; and had occasionally listened to a tragedy, or perhaps father a dramatic history, based on some familiar legend of their own State.  And the conditions of social life in Rome and Athens were not so different but that in the hands of a real genius like Plautus the New Athenian comedy could come home to the Roman people, with their delight in rather rough fun and comical situations:  and Plautus was followed by Caecilius and the more refined Terence, before the national comedy of Afranius and others established itself in the place of the Greek.  It is hardly possible to avoid the conclusion that in those early days of the Roman theatre the audiences were really intelligent, and capable of learning something from the pieces they listened to, apart from their natural love of a show, of all acting, and of music.[499]