he Roman gods, the ritual,
military, and juristic terms of the Romans, present a strange
appearance amid the Greek world; Roman -aediles- and -tresviri- are
grotesquely mingled with -agoranomi- and -demarchi-; pieces whose
scene is laid in Aetolia or Epidamnus send the spectator without
scruple to the Velabrum and the Capitol. Such a patchwork of Roman
local tints distributed over the Greek ground is barbarism enough; but
interpolations of this nature, which are often in their naive way very
ludicrous, are far more tolerable than that thorough alteration of the
pieces into a ruder shape, which the editors deemed necessary to suit
the far from Attic culture of their audience. It is true that several
even of the new Attic poets probably needed no accession to their
coarseness; pieces like the -Asinaria- of Plautus cannot owe their
unsurpassed dulness and vulgarity solely to the translator.
Nevertheless coarse incidents so prevail in the Roman comedy, that the
translators must either have interpolated them or at least have made a
very one-sided selection. In the endless abundance of cudgelling and
in the lash ever suspended over the back of the slaves we recognize
very clearly the household-government inculcated by Cato, just as
we recognize the Catonian opposition to women in the never-ending
disparagement of wives. Among the jokes of their own invention, with
which the Roman editors deemed it proper to season the elegant Attic
dialogue, several are almost incredibly unmeaning and barbarous.(25)

Metrical Treatment

So far as concerns metrical treatment on the other hand, the flexible
and sounding verse on the whole does all honour to the composers. The
fact that the iambic trimeters, which predominated in the originals
and were alone suitable to their moderate conversational tone, were
very frequently replaced in the Latin edition by iambic or trochaic
tetrameters, is to be attributed not so much to any want of skill
on the part of the editors who knew well how to handle the trimeter,
as to the uncultivated taste of the Roman public which was pleased
with the sonorous magnificence of the long verse even where it was
not appropriate.

Scenic Arrangements

Lastly, the arrangements for the production of the pieces on the stage
bore the like stamp of indifference to aesthetic requirements on the
part of the managers and the public. The stage of the Greeks--which
on account of the extent of the theatre and from the