and accomplished four tragedies in sixteen days, and this apparently in the course of the campaign.[503] One, the Erigona, was sent to his brother from Britain, and lost on the way.  We hear no more of these plays, and have no reason to suppose that they were worthy to survive.  No man of literary eminence in that day wrote plays for acting, and in fact the only person of note, so far as we know, who did so, was the younger Cornelius Balbus, son of the intimate friend and secretary of Caesar.  This man wrote one in Latin about his journey to his native town of Gades, had it put on the stage there, and shed tears during its performance.[504]

When we hear of plays being written without being acted, and of tragedies being made the occasion of expressing political opinions, we may be pretty sure that the drama is in its nonage.  An interesting proof of the same tendency is to be found in the first book of the Ars Amatoria of Ovid, though it belongs to the age of Augustus.  In this book Ovid describes the various resorts in the city where the youth may look out for his girl; and when he comes to the theatre, draws a pretty picture of the ladies of taste and fashion crowding thither,—­but

  Spectatum veniunt:  veniunt spectentur ut ipsae.

And then, without a word about the play, or the smallest hint that he or the ladies really cared about such things, he goes off into the familiar story of the rape of the Sabine women, supposed to have taken place when Romulus was holding his ludi.

It is curious, in view of what thus seems to be a flagging interest in the drama as such, to find that the most remarkable event in the theatrical history of this time is the building of the first permanent stone theatre.  During the whole long period of the popularity of the drama the government had never consented to the erection of a permanent theatre after the Greek fashion; though it was impossible to prohibit the production of plays adapted from the Greek, there seems to have been some strange scruple felt about giving Rome this outward token of a Greek city.  Temporary stages were erected in the Forum or the circus, the audience at first standing, but afterwards accommodated with seats in a cavea of wood erected for the occasion.  The whole show, including play, actors, and pipe-players[505] to accompany the voices where necessary, was contracted for, like all such undertakings,[506] on each occasion of Ludi scaenici being produced.  At last, in the year 154 B.C., the censors had actually set about the building of a theatre, apparently of stone, when the reactionary Scipio Nasica, acting under the influence of a temporary anti-Greek movement, persuaded the senate to put a stop to this symptom of degeneracy, and to pass a decree that no seats were in future to be provided, “ut scilicet remissioni animorum standi virilitas propria Romanae gentis iuncta esset."[507] Whether this extraordinary decree, of which the legality might