Ambigitur quoties uter utro sit prior, aufert
Pacuvius docti famam senis, Accius alti.
Aulus Gellius quotes the epitaph of Pacuvius, written by himself to be inscribed on his tombstone, with a tribute of admiration to 'its modesty, simplicity, and fine serious spirit'—'Epigramma Pacuvii verecundissimum et purissimum dignumque ejus elegantissima gravitate.'
Adolescens, tametsi properas, te hoc saxum rogat,
Ut se aspicias, deinde quod scriptum est, legas,
Hic sunt poetae Pacuvi Marci sita
Ossa. Hoc volebam nescius ne esses. Vale.[134]
With its quiet and modest simplicity of tone this inscription is still significant of that dignified self-consciousness which characterised all the early Roman poets, though the feeling may have been displayed with more prominence by Naevius and Plautus, by Ennius, Accius, and Lucilius, than by Pacuvius.
Among the testimonies to his literary qualities the best known is that of Horace, quoted above. Cicero, in speaking of the age of Laelius as that of the purest Latinity, does not allow this merit to Pacuvius and to the comic poet Caecilius. He says of them, 'male locutos esse[135].' Pacuvius seems to have attempted to introduce new forms of words, such as 'temeritudo,' 'geminitudo,' 'vanitudo,' 'concorditas,' 'unose'; and also to have carried to a greater length than any of the older poets the tendency to form such poetical compounds as 'tardigradus,' 'flexanimus,' 'flexidicus,' 'cornifrontis'—a tendency which the Latin language continued more and more to repudiate in the hands of its most perfect masters. One line is quoted in which the tendency probably reached the extremest limits it ever did in any Latin author,—
Nerei repandirostrum incurvicervicum pecus.