Note 37 — Chapter VI

With this new sense of freedom and of fullness of life, the old restraints of religion and of the morality bound up with it were relaxed. The commons began to exercise less and less influence in the state. Their political indifference finds an echo in the slighting allusions which Plautus makes to the duties of public life37. The increased contact with the mind and life of the Greeks powerfully stimulated intellectual curiosity, but at the same time was a great solvent of faith, manners, and morals. The frequent use of the words congraecari, pergraecari, etc., in Plautus, shows that while the highest Roman minds were learning new lessons of wisdom and humanity from the great Greek writers of the past, the ordinary Roman was learning lessons of idleness and dissoluteness from the living Greeks of the time. The armies which returned from the Macedonian wars, and still more from that with Antiochus, brought with them new fashions and new appliances of luxury. Plautus shows a large indulgence, not unmixed with a vein of saturnine humour, for these new ways on which both young and old were eagerly entering. We see in him the unchecked exuberance of animal life, but no sign of the recklessness or the satiety of exhausted passions. Though there is more decorum, more refined sentiment, in the life of pleasure as presented by Terence, there is more often in Plautus an expression of a struggle between the new temptations and the old Roman ideas of thrift, active duty, and self-restraint. The conscience, though easily lulled to sleep, is still capable of feeling the sting of the thought contained in the Lucretian line—