In Cicero’s later years, when Roscius was dead and Aesopus retired, we hear no more of great actors of this type.  With these two remarkable men the great days of the Roman drama come to an end, and henceforward the favourite plays are merely farces, of which a word must here be said in the last place.

The origin of these farces, as indeed of all kinds of Latin comedy, and probably also of the literary satura, is to be found in the jokes and rude fun of the country festivals, and especially perhaps, as Horace tells us of the harvest amusements[521]: 

  Fescennina per hunc inventa licentia morem
  Versibus alternis opprobria rustica fudit,
  Libertasque recurrentis accepta per annos
  Lusit amabiliter, etc.

  Epist. ii. 1. 145 foll.

These amusements were always accompanied with the music and dancing so dear to the Italian peoples, and it is easy to divine how they may have gradually developed into plays of a rude but tolerably fixed type, with improvised dialogue, acted in the streets, or later in the intervals between acts at the theatre, and eventually as afterpieces, more after our own fashion.

In Cicero’s day two kinds of farces were in vogue.  In his earlier life the so-called Atellan plays (fabulae Atellanae) were the favourites:  these were of indigenous Latin origin, and probably took their name from the ruined town Atella, which might provide a permanent scenery as the background of the plays without offending the jealousy of any of the other Latin cities.[522] They were doubtless very comic, but it was possible to get tired of them, for the number of stock characters was limited, and the masks were always the same for each character—­the old man Pappus, the glutton Bucco, Dossennus the sharper, etc.  About the time of Sulla the mimes seem to have displaced these old farces in popular favour, perhaps because their fun was more varied; the mere fact that the actors did not wear masks shows that the improvisation could be freer and less stereotyped.  But both kinds were alike coarse, and may be called the comedy of low life in country towns and in the great city.  Sulla’s tastes seem to have been low in the matter of plays, if we may trust Plutarch, who asserts that when he was young he spent much of his time among mimi and jesters, and that when he was dictator he “daily got together from the theatre the lewdest persons, with whom he would drink and enter into a contest of coarse witticisms."[523] This may be due to the evidence of an enemy, but it is not improbable; and it is possible that both Sulla and Caesar, who also patronised the mimes, may have wished to avoid the personal allusions which, as we have seen, were so often made or imagined in the exhibition of tragedies, and have aimed at confining the plays to such as would give less opportunity for unwelcome criticism.[524]