Si esses homo,
Sineres nunc facere, dum per aetatem licet,
expresses the philosophy of many of his love poems and his drinking songs. The Epicurean sentiment and reflexion borrowed from Menander were congenial to one side of Horace's nature, as the manly independence and serious spirit of Lucilius were to another: and in his own style he has incorporated the conversational urbanity of the one writer no less than the intellectual vigour of the other. But Horace was much richer and more varied in the subjects of his art, as he was larger and more penetrating in his knowledge of the world, and more manly and serious in his view of life, than the comic poet who died so early in his career. It is as the 'puri sermonis amator' that Terence deserves to be ranked high among Latin authors. The limitation of his ambition to the production of a faithful copy of his original enables us better than any other evidence to appreciate the originality and creative force of Plautus. The absence of all moral fibre in his representations of character and his philosophy of life, makes us feel how necessary the Roman 'gravity' was for the creation of a new literature as well as for the conquest and governing of the world.
After the death of Terence the only writer of palliatae of any name was Sextus Turpilius, who died about the end of the second century B.C. No new element seems to have been contributed by him to the Roman Stage. After the decline of the Comoedia palliata, the Comoedia togata, which professed to represent the Roman and Italian life of the middle classes, first obtained popular favour. The principal writers of this branch of comedy were T. Quintius Atta and L. Afranius. The latter was regarded as the Roman Menander:—
Dicitur Afrani toga convenisse Menandro.
The admiration which he expressed for Terence, whom he regarded as the foremost of all the Roman comic poets, is in keeping with this criticism. From the testimony of Quintilian[284] we may infer that the change of scene from Athens to Rome and the provincial towns of Italy did not improve the morality of the Roman stage. A further decline both in intellectual interest and in moral tendency appeared in the resuscitation in a literary form of the Fabulae Atellanae, the chief writers of which were L. Pomponius and Novius. A still further degradation was witnessed in the later days of the Republic and under the Empire in the rise of the 'Mimus,' as a recognised branch of dramatic literature. If the influence of the comic stage, when its chief representatives were Plautus and Terence, is to be regarded as only of a mixed character, it is difficult to associate any idea of intellectual pleasure with the gross buffooneries of the Atellan farce, when it had passed from the spontaneous hilarity of primitive times into the conditions of an artistic performance, and still less with the 'mimi,' which were intended to gratify the lowest propensities of the spectators. The rapid degeneracy of the mass of the people from the characteristic virtues of the older Republic is testified as much by the popularity of such spectacles as by the passionate delight excited by the gladiatorial combats.
[264] 'In argumento Caecilius poscit palmam,' quoted from Varro.
[265] Ep. ad Attic. vii. 3; Brutus, 74.
[266] Cf. Mommsen, vol. ii. p. 435, English translation.
[267] 'Consulari utroque ac poeta.' Life of Terence, by Suetonius.