Quid hoc? sicine hoc fit? pedes, statin an non?
An id voltis ut me hinc jacentem aliqui tollat? etc.[255]
His temptation was to exaggerate in this, as in other elements of the dramatist's art; and this is what is probably meant by the word percurrat in the criticism of Horace, which has been already quoted. But this tendency to exaggerate is merely the defect of his superabundant share of the vigorous Italian qualities.
It is characteristic of the liveliness of Plautus' temperament, that the lyrical and recitative parts of his plays occupy a place altogether out of proportion to that occupied by the unimpassioned monologue or dialogue expressed in senarian iambics. The 'Cantica,' or purely lyrical monologues, are much more frequent and much longer in his comedies than in those of Terence. They were sung to a musical accompaniment, and were composed chiefly in bacchiac, anapaestic, or cretic metres, rapidly interchanging with trochaic lines. The bacchiac metre is employed in passages expressive of some sedate or laboured thought, as, for instance, the opening part of the 'Canticum' of Lysiteles in the Trinummus,—
Multas res simitu in meo corde vorso,
Multum in cogitando dolorem indipiscor.
Egomet me coquo et macero et defatigo.
The anapaestic metre was less suited to Latin, and is rarely met with either in the comic poets, or in the fragments of the tragedians. On the other hand, cretic and trochaic metres, from their affinity to the old Saturnian, came most easily to the early dramatists, and are largely employed by Plautus to express lively emotion. As an instance of the first we may take the following song of a lover, addressed to the bolts which barred his mistress's door,—
Pessuli, heus pessuli, vos saluto lubens,
Vos amo vos volo vos peto atque obsecro,