poets of the
capital. Naevius and Plautus were his cotemporaries and immediate
successors. All the plays of Plautus were translations and adaptations of
Greek originals; and Plautus was not even allowed to transfer the scene
from Greece to Rome. The Roman public wanted to see Greek life and Greek
depravity; it would have stoned the poet who had ventured to bring on the
stage a Roman patrician or a Roman matron. Greek tragedies, also, were
translated into Latin. Ennius, the cotemporary of Naevius and Plautus,
though somewhat younger (239-169), was the first to translate Euripides.
Ennius, like Andronicus, was an Italian Greek, who settled at Rome as a
teacher of languages and translator of Greek. He was patronized by the
liberal party, by Publius Scipio, Titus Flaminius, and Marcus Fulvius
Nobilior.(82) He became a Roman citizen. But Ennius was more than a poet,
more than a teacher of languages. He has been called a neologian, and to a
certain extent he deserved that name. Two works written in the most
hostile spirit against the religion of Greece, and against the very
existence of the Greek gods, were translated by him into Latin.(83) One
was the philosophy of _Epicharmus_ (470 B. C., in Megara), who taught that
Zeus was nothing but the air, and other gods but names of the powers of
nature; the other the work of _Euhemerus_, of Messene (300 B. C.), who
proved, in the form of a novel, that the Greek gods had never existed, and
that those who were believed in as gods had been men. These two works were
not translated without a purpose; and though themselves shallow in the
extreme, they proved destructive to the still shallower systems of Roman
theology. Greek became synonymous with infidel; and Ennius would hardly
have escaped the punishment inflicted on Naevius for his political satires,
had he not enjoyed the patronage and esteem of the most influential
statesmen at Rome. Even Cato, the stubborn enemy of Greek philosophy(84)
and rhetoric, was a friend of the dangerous Ennius; and such was the
growing influence of Greek at Rome, that Cato himself had to learn it in
his old age, in order to teach his boy what he considered, if not useful,
at least harmless in Greek literature. It has been the custom to laugh at
Cato for his dogged opposition to everything Greek; but there was much
truth in his denunciations. We have heard much of young Bengal--young
Hindus who read Byron and Voltaire, play at billiards, drive tandems,
laugh