be
presented at the public festivals. In the second century appeared the
great comic poet Plautus, who drew his subjects from the Greek New Comedy,
but whose metre and language were strictly Latin. He was followed by
Terence, a man of lesser genius, who depended largely upon Greek
originals, but who was distinguished for the purity and elegance of his
Latin. A later dramatist of note was Lucius Accius, who brought Roman
tragedy to its height. In both comedy and tragedy Greek plots and
characters were gradually abandoned for those of native origin, but
tragedy failed to appeal to the Roman public which was in general too
uneducated to appreciate its worth and preferred the comedy, mime or
gladiatorial combat. A notable figure is Ennius, a Messapian, who began to
write at the close of the third century B. C. He created the Latin
hexameter verse in which he wrote a great epic portraying the history of
Rome from the migration of Aeneas. Another famous member of the Scipionic
circle was Gaius Lucilius, a Roman of equestrian rank, who originated the
one specifically Roman contribution to literary types, the satire. His
poems were a criticism of life in all its aspects, public and private. He
called them "talks" (_sermones_), but they received the popular name of
satires because their colloquial language and the variety of their
subjects recalled the native Italian medley of prose and verse, narrative
and drama, known as the _satura_.

*II. Prose.* Latin prose developed more slowly. The earliest Roman
historical works by Fabius Pictor (after 201 B. C.), Cincius Alimentus,
and others, were written in Greek, for in that language alone could they
find suitable models. It remained for Cato, here as elsewhere the foe of
Hellenism, to create Latin historical prose in his _Origins_, an account
of the beginnings of Rome and the Italian peoples written about 168 B. C.
His earlier work on agriculture was the first book in Latin prose. The
work of the Carthaginian Mago on the same subject was translated into
Latin by a commission appointed by the Senate.

*Oratory.* The demands of public life in Rome had already created a native
oratory. A speech delivered by Appius Claudius in 279 B. C. had been
written down and published, as were several funeral orations from the
close of the third century. But it was Cato who first published a
collection of his speeches, about one hundred and fifty in number, which
enjoyed a great reputation. A new