at first the work of borrowing was attempted under a Roman dress and apparently in the hope of attracting all sorts and conditions of Roman society. Livius Andronicus, a Greek slave brought from Tarentum to Rome in 275 B.C. represented his first play in 240 B.C. The Livian play would seem to have been a rude performance, containing but a slight advance from pantomimic dancing towards personal dialogue; for, as Mr. Simcox observes, Livius "originated the curious division of labour whereby one actor, commonly himself, danced and acted while another, whom the audience were not supposed to see, sang the words which he would have sung himself if the exertion of singing and dancing at once had not been too overwhelming. Such a device implies that the public came for the spectacle, and held the pantomime more important than the song; so it is not strange that the plays of Livius Andronicus should have been very meagre, and that the dialogue should have been very little above stage directions, just serving to explain to the audience what was going on."[1] But Livius was something more than a pantomimic dancer; his translation of the Odyssey into Saturnian verse shows that he was attempting to popularise Greek culture at Rome by exhibiting the Greek Muses in the coarse garb of the Italian Camenæ. In this bold attempt to assimilate
- ↑ Even these performances of Livius, however, would seem to have been a considerable improvement on the older spectacles. Among these, the Saturæ appear to have been performances of the country clowns of Latium, in which separate songs or comic stories were sung or recited, with gesticulation and dancing, to the accompaniment of a tibia; their subjects were more varied than those of the Fescenninæ. The Mimes were performed by one principal actor; while in the Atellanæ "only the general plot was arranged, the rest being left to improvisation." The form of the Atellanæ "may be presumed to have been in most cases a simple dialogue, songs in Saturnian metre being perhaps interspersed; the jokes were coarse, accompanied by lively gesticulation which was also obscene." See Teuffel's Hist. Lat. Lit.
