AFRANIUS,
though he chose Roman subjects, whence his comedies were called Togatæ, was an imitator of the manner of Menander—
“Dicitur Afranî toga convenisse Menandro.”
Indeed he himself admits, in his Compitales, that he derived many even of his plots from Menander and other Greek writers—
“Fateor, sumpsi non a Menandro modo,
Sed ut quisque habuit, quod conveniret mihi;
Quod me non posse melius facere credidi.”
Cicero[290] calls Afranius an ingenious and eloquent writer. Ausonius, in one of his epigrams, talks “facundi Afrani.” He is also praised by Quintilian, who censures him, however, for the flagitious amours which he represented on the stage[291], on account of which, perhaps, his writings were condemned to[pg 171] the flames by Pope Gregory I. The titles of forty-six of his plays have been collected by Fabricius, and a few fragments have been edited by Stephens. One of these, in the play entitled Sella, where it is said that wisdom is the child of experience and memory, has been commended by Aulus Gellius, and is plausibly conjectured[292] to have been introduced in a prologue spoken in the person of Wisdom herself—
“Usus me genuit, mater peperit Memoria:
Sophiam vocant me Graii; vos Sapientiam.”
The following lines from the Vopiscum have also been frequently quoted:
“Si possent homines delinimentis capi,
Omnes haberent nunc amatores anus.
Ætas, et corpus tenerum, et morigeratio,
Hæc sunt venena formosarum mulierum[293].”