sed tragedies when advanced in life, belongs as
respects both his years and his style to the sixth rather than
the seventh century, although his poetical activity falls within
the latter. He composed on the whole after the manner of his
countryman, uncle, and master Ennius. Polishing more carefully and
aspiring to a higher strain than his predecessor, he was regarded
by favourable critics of art afterwards as a model of artistic
poetry and of rich style: in the fragments, however, that have
reached us proofs are not wanting to justify the censure of the
poet's language by Cicero and the censure of his taste by Lucilius;
his language appears more rugged than that of his predecessor, his
style of composition pompous and punctilious.(1) There are traces
that he like Ennius attached more value to philosophy than to
religion; but he did not at any rate, like the latter, prefer
dramas chiming in with neological views and preaching sensuous
passion or modern enlightenment, and drew without distinction from
Sophocles or from Euripides--of that poetry with a decided special
aim, which almost stamps Ennius with genius, there can have been
no vein in the younger poet.

Accius

More readable and adroit imitations of Greek tragedy were furnished
by Pacuvius' younger contemporary, Lucius Accius, son of a freedman
of Pisaurum (584-after 651), with the exception of Pacuvius the
only notable tragic poet of the seventh century. An active author
also in the field of literary history and grammar, he doubtless
laboured to introduce instead of the crude manner of his
predecessors greater purity of language and style into Latin
tragedy; yet even his inequality and incorrectness were
emphatically censured by men of strict observance like Lucilius.

Greek Comedy
Terence

Far greater activity and far more important results are apparent
in the field of comedy. At the very commencement of this period
a remarkable reaction set in against the sort of comedy hitherto
prevalent and popular. Its representative Terentius (558-595) is
one of the most interesting phenomena, in a historical point of
view, in Roman literature. Born in Phoenician Africa, brought in
early youth as a slave to Rome and there introduced to the Greek
culture of the day, he seemed from the very first destined for the
vocation of giving back to the new Attic comedy that cosmopolitan
character, which in its adaptation to the Roman public under the
rough hands of Naevi