Note 6 — Chapter VI

The rhetorical character of Roman education and the rhetorical tendencies of the Roman mind secured favour for this kind of composition till the age of Quintilian. His dictum 'in comoedia maxime claudicamus,' on the other hand, implies that the educated taste of Romans under the Empire did not find much that was congenial in the works of Plautus, Caecilius, or Terence. The tone of Horace is more contemptuous towards Plautus than towards Ennius and the tragic poets. While tragedy continued to be cultivated by eminent writers in the Augustan age and early Empire, few original comedies seem to have been written after the beginning of the first century b.c.6 The higher efforts of the comic muse were almost, if not entirely, superseded by the Mimus. These considerations show that comedy was not congenial to the educated or the uneducated taste of Romans in the last years of the Republic, and in the early Empire. But, on the other hand, the popularity enjoyed by the old comedy between the time of Naevius and of Terence, and even down to the earlier half of the Ciceronian age, when some of the great parts in Plautus continued to be performed by the 'accomplished Roscius,' and the admiration expressed for its authors by grammarians and critics, from Aelius Stilo down to Varro and Cicero, show its adaptation to an earlier and not less vigorous, if less refined stage of intellectual development; while the actual survival of many Roman comedies can only be accounted for by a more real adaptation to human nature, both in style and substance, than was attained by Roman tragedy in its straining after a higher ideal of sentiment and expression.