poets of the republican period must in general be
taken on trust. The Campanian Cn. Naevius (fl. from 236) wrote comedies
as well as tragedies, so that the rigorous separation observed among the
Greeks in the cultivation of the two dramatic species was at first
neglected at Rome. His realistic tendency, displayed in that fondness
for political allusions which brought upon him the vengeance of a noble
family (the Metelli) incapable of understanding a joke of this
description, might perhaps under more favourable circumstances have led
him more fully to develop a new tragic species invented by him. But the
_fabula praetexta_ or _praetextata_ (from the purple-bordered robe worn
by higher magistrates) was not destined to become the means of
emancipating the Roman serious drama from the control of Greek examples.
In design, it was national tragedy on historic subjects of patriotic
interest--which the Greeks had treated only in isolated instances; and
one might at first sight marvel why, after Naevius and his successors
had produced skilful examples of the species, it should have failed to
overshadow and outlast in popularity a tragedy telling the oft-told
foreign tales of Thebes and Mycenae, or even the pseudo-ancestral story
of Troy. But it should not be forgotten to how great an extent so-called
early Roman history consisted of the traditions of the _gentes_, and how
little the party-life of later republican Rome lent itself to a dramatic
treatment likely to be acceptable both to the nobility and to the
multitude. As for the emperors, the last licence they would have
permitted to the theatre was a free popular treatment of the national
history; if Augustus prohibited the publication of a tragedy by his
adoptive father on the subject of _Oedipus_, it was improbable that he
or his successors should have sanctioned the performance of plays
dealing with the earthly fortunes of Divus Julius himself, or with the
story of Marius, or that of the Gracchi, or any of the other tragic
themes of later republican or imperial history. The historic drama at
Rome thus had no opportunity for a vigorous life, even could tragedy
have severed its main course from the Greek literature of which it has
been well called a "free-hand copy." The _praetextae_ of which we know
chiefly treat--possibly here and there helped to form[80]--legends of a
hoary antiquity, or celebrate battles chronicled in family or public
records[81]; and in the end the species