If death of any mortal sadden hearts immortal,
The heavenly Muses surely Naevius’ death bemoan;
For after he departed to the shades of Orcus
The voice of Rome is silent music is forgotten.
Ennius abandoned the line, and it was eventually doomed, just as the Anglo-Saxon meters in England began to disappear when the richer rhythms of French poetry came to be appreciated.
It was Naevius also who broke away from Greek subjects in the drama, though with what success we cannot say. He made what we may call a “chronicle play” of the Romulus legend which disregarded the conventional unities, and he also wrote a pageantry play to commemorate the heroic single combat of Marcellus with a Celtic chieftain. He is therefore among the first to stage contemporary drama and to disregard the restrictions of time and place. That he made the same innovations in comedies like his Hariolus is probable but cannot be proved from the few lines that remain.
An independent creator he was and might have carried progress far had not so large a part of his activity fallen in the restraining period of the Second Punic War. His end was in character. Accustomed to speak his mind freely in his comedies, he vigorously supported the Fabian policy when it was unpopular, and after the group supporting Scipio, which demanded a more aggressive conduct of the war, came into power, he continued his sarcastic criticism of the Scipionic group. Rome had always tolerated free speech, but even at Rome patience was short in war time. War censorship discovered an old law which, with a little imaginative interpretation, could be stretched to cover the case of this satirist.[1] Only one line has survived of the satiric comedy which referred to the fact that Metellus, a friend of Scipio’s, had taken advantage of a fortuitous circumstance to stand for the consulship. He was elected through no desert of his own. The point of the line—Fato Metelli Romae fiunt consoles—rests on a double entendre, because fato may be construed either as ablative or as dative, while Romae may be genitive or locative. The line therefore may mean either:
“The Metelli became consuls at Rome by chance,”
which is hardly a flattering remark, or what is even less flattering:
“The Metelli became consuls to Rome’s sorrow.”