died a natural death.[82]

Ennius and his successors.

Q. Ennius (239-168), the favourite poet of the great families, was
qualified by his Tarentine education, which taught the Oscan youth the
Greek as well as the Latin tongue (so that he boasted "three souls"), to
become the literary exponent of the Hellenizing tendencies of his age of
Roman society. Nearly half of the extant names of his tragedies belong
to the Trojan cycle; and Euripides was clearly his favourite source and
model. M. Pacuvius (b. c. 229), like Ennius subject from his youth up to
the influences of Greek civilization, and the first Roman dramatist who
devoted himself exclusively to the tragic drama, was the least fertile
of the chief Roman tragedians, but was regarded by the ancients as
indisputably superior to Ennius. He again was generally (though not
uniformly) held to have been surpassed by L. Accius (b. 170), a learned
scholar and prolific dramatist, of whose plays 50 titles and a very
large number of fragments have been preserved. The plays of the
last-named three poets maintained themselves on the stage till the close
of the republic; and Accius was quoted by the emperor Tiberius.[83] Of
the other tragic writers of the republic several were _dilettanti_--such
as the great orator and eminent politician C. Julius Strabo; the
cultivated officer Q. Tullius Cicero, who made an attempt, disapproved
by his illustrious brother, to introduce the satyr-drama into the Roman
theatre; L. Cornelius Balbus, a Caesarean partisan; and finally C.
Julius Caesar himself.

Seneca.

Tragedy continued to be cultivated under the earlier emperors; and one
author, the famous and ill-fated L. Annaeus Seneca (4 B.C.-A.D. 65),
left behind him a series of works which were to exercise a paramount
influence upon the beginnings of modern tragedy. In accordance with the
character of their author's prose-work, they exhibit a strong
predominance of the rhetorical element, and an artificiality of style
far removed from that of the poets Sophocles and Euripides, from whom
Seneca derived his themes. Yet he is interesting, not only by these
devices and by a "sensational" choice of themes, but also by a quickness
of treatment which we may call "modern," a quality not easily resisted
in a dramatist. The metrification of his plays is very strict, and they
were doubtless intended for recitation, whether or not also designed for
the stage. A few tragic poets are mentioned afte