The Roman Poets of the Republic, 3rd edition

by W. Y. Sellar

[⁴⁵] 'O king, what men usually do in life, what they think about, care about, see,—their pursuits and occupations, when awake,—if these occur to any one in sleep, it is not wonderful.'

[⁴⁶] 'So huge a mass is approaching—sounding from the deep with a mighty rushing noise; it rolls the waves before it, forces through the eddies, plunges forward, throws up and dashes back the sea.'—Quoted in Cic. De Nat. Deor. ii. 35.

[⁴⁷] 'Lying beneath the pole by the seven stars, whence the blustering roar of the north-wind drives before it the chill snows.'

[⁴⁸] 'By chance before the dawn, harbinger of burning rays, when the husbandmen bring forth the oxen from their rest into the fields, that they may break the red, dew-sprinkled soil with the plough, and turn up the clods from the soft soil.'

[⁴⁹] 'That rock makes the passage narrow, and from beneath that rock a spring gushing out sweeps past the river's bank.'

[⁵⁰] Inst. Or. x. i. 99.

CHAPTER VI.

Roman Comedy. Plautus. About 254 To 184 b.c.

The era in which Roman epic and tragic poetry arose was also the flourishing era of Roman comedy. A later generation looked back on the age of Ennius and Plautus as an age of great poets, who had passed away:—