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To this he added a few words by way of encouragement, what they might expect from his own liberality, if they should follow him and Attius. On the delivery of this speech, no intimation of their future conduct is given by Curio's army, and thus both generals led back their troops to their camp.
Here too the preparations were in full course; in the very northernmost Picenian town Auximum a considerable band of recruits was collected under Publius Attius Varus; but at the entreaty of the municipality Varus evacuated the town even before Caesar appeared, and a handful of Caesar's soldiers which overtook the troop not far from Auximum totally dispersed it after a brief conflict the first in this war.
Although a fragment of that perished master-piece be still extant in the Latin version of Attius it is quite impossible to conjecture what were the personages introduced in the tragedy of Aeschylus, or by what train of passions and events he was able to sustain himself on the height of that awful scene with which his surviving Prometheus terminates.
TRAGIC POETS. Three separate eras produced tragic poets. In the first flourished Livius Andronicus, Naevius, and Ennius; in the second, Pacuvius and Attius; in the third, Asinius Pollio wrote tragedies, the plots of which seem to have been taken from Roman history. Ovid attempted a "Medea," and even the Emperor Augustus, with other men of genius, tried his hand, though unsuccessfully, at tragedy.
The plays of Attius owed much of their success to the ability with which statement was pitted against counter-statement, plea against plea. The philosophic works of Cicero are coloured with rhetoric. The history of Livy, the epic of Virgil, are eminently rhetorical. A Roman when not fighting was pleading. It was, then, important that he should he well grounded in the art.
A funereal monument found in the neighbourhood of Nismes in 1824, offers a very interesting object, being in a good state of preservation. It is richly decorated, and by the inscription is proved to have been that of Marcus Attius, aged twenty-five years, erected to him by his mother Coelia, daughter of Sextus Paternus.
His host was a certain Attius Tullus, than whom there was none among the Volscians either more powerful or more hostile to Rome. So the two held counsel together how they might stir up war. They knew, indeed, that the people could not easily be moved to that which they had tried so often with ill success.
In consequence of this warning proclamation was made that every Volscian should leave Rome before the setting of the sun. This produced the effect which Attius had hoped. He met the Volscians on their way home, and found them fired with indignation against Rome. He pretended similar indignation. "You have been made a show of before all the nations," he cried.
Ought we to contemn Attius Navius's staff, with which he divided the regions of the vine to find his sow?
This indeed must necessarily happen to all whose lives are of any considerable length: for they are equally liable to a comparison with their Elders and their Juniors; as in the case of the poet Attius, who says that both he and Pacuvius applied themselves to the cultivation of the drama under the fame Aediles; though, at the time, the one was eighty, and the other only thirty years old.
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