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Updated: June 24, 2025
I wish, however, they had excepted from their unqualified panegyrics the coarse imitation of the Fescennine poems, which leaves in our minds a stronger impression of the prevalence and extent of Roman vices, than any other passage in the Latin classics.
Most frequently the dice were thrown by the company, and those upon whom the lot fell were obliged to assume and maintain, for a time, a certain fictitious character, or to repeat a certain number of fescennine verses in a particular order.
The Fescennine songs were metrical, for the accompaniments of music and dancing necessarily restricted them to measure, and, like the dramatic exhibitions of the Greeks, they had their origin among the rural population, not like them in any religious ceremonial, but in the pastimes of the village festival.
In this way there arose not merely alternative chants, such as afterwards went by the name of Fescennine songs, but also the elements of a popular comedy which were in this instance planted in a soil admirably adapted for their growth, as an acute sense of the outward and the comic, and a delight in gesticulation and masquerade have ever been leading traits of Italian character.
The old songs of Scotland existed, with the airs, partly in human memory, partly in scattered broadsheets. The airs were good, but the words were often silly, more often they were Fescennine "more dirt than wit."
We gather from Livy that they were acted on the stage as early as 359 B.C. Before this the boards had been occupied by Etruscan dancers, and possibly, though not certainly, by improvisers of Fescennine buffooneries; but soon after this date Saturae were performed by one or more actors to the accompaniment of the flute.
While you lived, taste kept the French drama pure; and it was the congenial business of English playwrights to foist their rustic grossness and their large Fescennine jests into the urban page of Moliere. Now they are diversely occupied; and it is their affair to lend modesty where they borrow wit, and to spare a blush to the cheek of the Lord Chamberlain.
Most frequently the dice were thrown by the company, and those upon whom the lot fell were obliged to assume and maintain for a time a certain fictitious character, or to repeat a certain number of fescennine verses in a particular order.
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.
Livius Andronicus, who flourished about 240 years before the Christian aera, formed the Fescennine verses into a kind of regular drama, upon the model of the Greeks. He was followed some time after by Ennius, who, besides dramatic and other compositions, wrote the annals of the Roman Republic in heroic verse.
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