led Mummers in Great Britain, and Livy describes them as
Balladines who travelled to Rome from Tuscany. Though their merit could
not have been great, they were very much applauded. Applause produced
improvement, and they soon formed themselves into companies called
histrioni, who performed regular pieces called satires. These, which
were at best entitled to no higher rank than bad farces, kept exclusive
possession of the public regards for a hundred and twenty years.

It was at the end of that period, and about two hundred and forty years
before the Christian aera that the first play performed after the manner
of the Greeks, was brought forward in Rome, by Livius Andronicus, the
earliest of the Roman dramatic poets. He turned the personal Satires and
Fescenine verses so long the admiration of the Romans, into regular form
and dialogue, and though the character of a player, so long valued and
applauded in Greece, was reckoned vile and despicable among the Romans,
Andronicus himself acted a part in his dramatic compositions. At the
time of Cicero the works of this poet were obsolete; yet some passages
of them are preserved in the _Corpus Poetarum_.

It is related of Livius Andronicus that he at first formed and sung his
pieces in the manner of his predecessors, despairing of being able to
accomplish any improvement in the Roman theatre, but that one day being
surrounded by the multitude and excessively fatigued, he called a slave
to relieve him while he recovered his breath. Displeased with the
bungling manner in which the slave performed this new task, Livius
rebuked him very severely, the slave justified, the master replied, and
a dialogue ensued which the spectators imagining to be a part of the
plan of the piece, greatly applauded. The drama at once broke upon their
view in a new and superior aspect--they perceived that it was in
familiar colloquial communications, such as men use in real life, that
human affairs and the hearts of men could be justly imitated, and
Andronicus taking advantage of this singular and felicitous incident,
composed and represented regular dramas in dialogue.

To Livius Andronicus is due the praise of having first refined the Roman
taste in dramatic poetry, as Ennius had but a short time before done in
Epic, by introducing the Greek model, as the standard of literature.
Both were, according to Suetonius, half Greeks, and were masters of both
languages. The taste for tragedy, however, held it