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An explanation quite similar may be given of the "lays of Fescennium," which likewise belong to the burlesque poetry of the Romans and were localized in the South Etruscan village of Fescennium; it is not necessary on that account to class them with Etruscan poetry any more than the Atellanae with Oscan.
They were known by the name of "Fabulae Atellanae," from Attela, a town in Campania, where they were first performed. They remained in favor with the Roman people for centuries. Sylla amused his leisure hours in writing them, and Suetonius bears testimony to their having been a popular amusement under the empire.
I. II. Religion We shall show in due time that the Atellanae and Fescenninae belonged not to Campanian and Etruscan, but to Latin art. Literally "word-crisping," in allusion to the -calamistri Maecenatis-. I. III. Alba Of this character were the Servian walls.
When the Greek drama was brought into Rome by Livius Andronicus, the Fabulae Atellanae, or Laudi Osci derived from the town of Atella, in Campania, between Capua and Naples was still employed to furnish the Interludes, and just in a similar way as the Satyra Extemporal Interludes supplied the Grecian stage.
From these rustic festivals originated the Satyr, or Satirical Drama, as did its Italian prototype, the Fabulae Atellanae or, Laudi Osci.
First, the great increase of luxury and show, and with it the appetite for the gaudy trappings of the spectacle; secondly, the failure of legitimate drama, and the fact that the Atellanae, with their patrician surroundings, were only half popular; and lastly, the familiarity with the different offshoots of Greek comedy, thrown out in rank profusion at Alexandria, and capable of assimilation with the plastic materials of the Mimus.
Afranius is sufficiently indicated as of a kindred spirit with Menander and Terence by the judgment of posterity that he wore the -toga- as Menander would have worn it had he been an Italian, and by his own expression that to his mind Terence surpassed all other poets. Atellanae The farce appeared afresh at this period in the field of Roman literature.
The extemporary compositions called Fabulae Atellanae, the only original and national form of the Roman drama, in respect of plan, were not perhaps more perfect than the so-called Commedia dell' Arte, in which, the parts being fixed and invariable, the dialogue is extemporised by masked actors.
Their occupation was music and dancing "with a stick;" in fact, they were performers in those curious and extremely ancient Fescennine farces, or Atellanae, which are depicted on ancient vases, and are still acted on the roads in Egypt as they were in Greece before the days of Thespis.
The only forms that lingered on were the Atellanae, and those few plebeian types of comedy known as Togata and Tabernaria. But even these had now withered. The present epoch brings before us a fresh type of composition in the Mime, which now first took a literary shape.
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