“Attonitusque legis terräi frugiferäi,
Attius et quicquid Pacuviusque vomunt.”
Such sentiments, however, as is evident from Horace’s Epistle [pg 228]to Augustus, proceeded in a great measure from the modern poets being provoked at an admiration, which they thought did not originate in a real sense of the merit of these old writers, but in an envious wish to depreciate, by odious comparison, the productions of the day—
“Jam Saliare Numæ carmen qui laudat, et illud
Quod mecum ignorat, solus vult scire videri;
Ingentis non ille favet, plauditque sepultis,
Nostra sed impugnat—nos, nostraque lividus odit.”
But although a great proportion of the public may, with malicious designs, have heaped extravagant commendations on the style of the ancient tragedians, there can be no doubt that it is full of vigour and richness; and if inferior to the exquisite refinement of the Augustan age, it was certainly much to be preferred to the obscurity of Persius, or the conceits of Martial. “A very imperfect notion,” says Wakefield, in one of his letters to Fox, “is entertained in general of the copiousness of the Latin language, by those who confine themselves to what are styled the Augustan writers. The old comedians and tragedians, with Ennius and Lucilius, were the great repositories of learned and vigorous expression. I have ever regarded the loss of the old Roman poets, particularly Ennius and Lucilius, from the light they would have thrown on the formations of the Latin language, and its derivation from the Æolian Greek, as the severest calamity ever sustained by philological learning[364].” Sometimes, indeed, their words are uncouth, particularly their compound terms and epithets, in the formation of which they are not nearly so happy as the Greeks. Livius Andronicus uses Odorisequos canes—Pacuvius employs Repandirostrum and Incurvicervicum. Such terms always appear incongruous and disjointed, and not knit together so happily as Cyclops, and other similar words of the Greeks.
The different classes into which the regular drama of this period may be reduced, is a subject involved in great contradiction and uncertainty, and has been much agitated in consequence of Horace’s celebrated line—
“Vel qui Prætextas vel qui docuere Togatas[365].”