[16] Cf. C. M. Kurrelmeyer, Economy of Actors in Plautus. The well-known Horatian rule was a later reversion to a Greek rule. Choral singers were apparently imported from Greece in large numbers in the days of Accius; there was a Societas cantorum Graecorum at Rome then: see Raccolta in onore G. Lombroso, 287. In England the early companies that played the interludes seldom numbered over four, and yet they had at times to take care of sixteen or more rôles. Doubling was less drastic in Shakespeare’s theater but it sufficed to allow the dramatist the privilege of producing diversified effects by using many rôles for only one scene or act. In Hamlet alone there are some ten rôles of this type. Plautus and Terence do not hesitate to dismiss a character after the first scene or indeed to introduce one in the last.
[17] Diomedes, in G. L. K., I, 489, quod oculis perversis erat. The late commentators seem to have had very little information on the subject.
[18] On Roscius, see Von der Mühll in Pauly-Wiss. sub. voc., 1123. There is no evidence whatever for the traditional conjecture that Roscius and Aesopus were freedmen. The sister of Roscius married into a well-known family. Aesopus was probably a Greek who, like Archias, had been given citizenship in some municipality as an honor. His position at Rome was such that it is impossible to suppose that he had ever been a slave.
[19] Cic., De Rep. iv 10; Livy VII, 2, is full of anachronisms. Cf. Warnecke, Neue Jahrb. 1914, 94. However, Warnecke fails to note how late the evidence is and how completely it disagrees with the known circumstances of the early Roman drama. Plautus, Cist. 785, which promises a flogging to the incapable actor, is of course one of the jokes of the play. The ninth article of the recently discovered charter of Cyrene excuses from certain public service various people (including doctors and teachers of music) who are engaged in professions of public welfare. Since the actors’ guild at Rome was based upon Alexandrian models, it is not unlikely that certain Ptolemaic regulations were also taken over.
CHAPTER IV
TERENCE AND HIS SUCCESSORS
Plautus lived in the most productive period of Roman comedy. He happens to mention only one rival, the aged Naevius, but from later sources we learn of Caecilius, Licinius, Trabea, Atilius, Titinius, and others who apparently began to write before the death of Plautus. That all of these actually staged plays we may be sure, since manuscripts had no chance of surviving unless they came into the official archives by way of purchase for production. So numerous were the old manuscripts in these archives that Plautus, who could at most not have written more than thirty or forty plays, was later credited with a hundred and thirty. Apparently unsigned plays were attributed to him because of the commercial value of his name. But the fact that so many stray plays were in existence is significant of the activity of writers. It is not surprising therefore that a guild of “writers and actors” flourished in the days of Plautus, and that the state recognized it and assigned it quarters on the Aventine.
Of the earlier men from whose works we have fragments, only two are in any way individualized in the scant remains. Titinius, who seems to have been a late rival of Plautus, was so thoroughly lost to his successors that Cicero seems not to have been aware of him. But Varro refers to Titinius in high terms in his work on the Latin language, written while he was gathering books for Caesar’s projected public library. Varro probably was the man who ferreted out his plays and name from the aediles’ archives. It is signal praise that Varro gives Titinius when he places him by the side of Terence as a delineator of character. An allusion to one of his plays by Horace seems to indicate that some of his work was actually staged in the early Empire (more than a hundred years after the dramatist’s death) for the poet refers to a scene that is visualized rather than to a line read, and he assumes that Augustus will recognize his allusion.[1]
What Titinius did was to follow a suggestion made by Naevius and write original comedies (togatae) with native plots, scenes, and characters. When we recall how Plautus found it prudent to cling to Greek plots for social and moral reasons, we see that Titinius must have had a vein of daring. That he was lauded among the very foremost for characterization is the more remarkable since he did not adapt characters already well outlined. It was no easy task to present before the old Catonian society comedies revolving about Roman men and women, and to rival the plays of Plautus which could legitimately appropriate all the attractive plots of Hellenistic Athens. Donatus remarks naïvely that realistic Roman comedy of the old day, unlike the Greek comedy, could not picture slaves as more clever than their masters. This statement, of course, does not go to the heart of the matter, but it is one way of saying that the Romans, who insisted on social decorum in home life, were in no mood to see themselves pictured as the gulls of spoiled sons and saucy slaves. If the togata had to eliminate all such scenes, it must have altered the whole tone of comedy. But that was not all. We have noticed how Plautus was compelled to change and attenuate feminine rôles because the Romans had nothing to put in the place of the semi-respectable Greek hetaerae with whom the youth of Athens associated freely. What was there for Titinius to do in writing Roman plays? It was out of the question to insult the dignity of the noble household with stories of boisterous love affairs; and yet he apparently did not wish to sacrifice such plots either by avoiding the female characters or by using those that Roman society disdained. He did want the love story and he wanted it both wholesome enough to attract Rome and natural enough to give a free play of emotions in an active plot, and he found it in a way that Plautus had not. He abandoned the jeunesse dorée of the standard Greek play and resorted to the natural and free society of the Italian village communities outside of the great capital, where, as in Italian villages of today, honest young men and women of humble circumstances worked together at daily tasks in shops, at counters, desks, and work benches. Titinius made a real discovery when he left the artificial society of aristocratic Rome because it gave no opportunity for treating of natural relations between the unmarried young of both sexes and went out into the near-by villages of Latium or the humbler streets of the city where more normal conditions obtained. He was perhaps the first writer of Roman comedy who could draw his material from life and still base his comedy on a love story. Only fifteen titles of his plays have survived, but nine of these take their name from the leading female characters in the plays: The Maid of Setia, The Lady of the Dye Shop, The Girl of Velitrae, The Twin Sister, The Girl Who Knows Something about the Law, The Stepmother, Pyrrha the Weaver, The Dancing Girl of Ferentinum, The Flute-player and The Girl of Ulubrae. These heroines are folk in humble life but the fragments show that they are none the less sprightly, quick-witted and interesting creatures. Today we are sadly at a loss in trying to comprehend the life of the great masses of the people during the Plautine period. Plautus in his re-shapings of Greek plots reflects it only in his suppressions and intimations, and then very imperfectly. Livy in his dignified and voluminous history of this period strides majestically over it. We would gladly surrender much of both for the faithful and sympathetic picture that a volume of Titinius could give us. If Varro’s judgment was right in lauding the power of characterization of this author we might, if he were rescued, find him a place by the side of very modern realists.
Caecilius Statius is the other writer of comedy vying with Plautus of whom something is known, and he too deserves to be remembered with a keen hope that his works may some day come to light. He was more orthodox than Titinius, kept, like Plautus, more or less close to his Greek models, and obeyed the same social purpose of not offending puritanic taste by dressing his players in Greek garb. Strange to say, he was a Celt, the first in the history of literature. He had apparently been captured as a boy somewhere near Milan when the Romans were campaigning there during the Hannibalic war. That he was not a mere child at the time becomes evident from the fact that he never wrote Latin quite well enough to suit the discriminating ear of Cicero—who otherwise read him with pleasure. Yet he somehow received a good education—as bright slaves often did—for he knew Greek well. He also got his freedom somehow and became a close associate of Ennius. He lived long enough to give aid to Terence in the production of that young man’s first youthful play, the Andria, and was generous enough to recommend the play to the aediles when they hesitated to accept it. Ambivius, the loyal producer of Terence, remarks in one of the prologues which he spoke for Terence that Caecilius had had a discouraging series of rejections in his youth but that he, Ambivius, confident of the poet’s worth, had persisted in presenting the plays till success was assured.[2] A later critic, Volcacius—who, to be sure, takes no account of the togatae in this particular list—places Caecilius at the very head of the writers of comedy, giving Plautus second place and Terence sixth. Unfortunately we do not happen to know whether this critic was a man of sound judgment.