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Updated: June 2, 2025
The metre selected was the elegiac, on account of its natural pause at the close of the second line. The nearest approach to such simple epigrams are the epitaphs of Naevius, Ennius, and especially Pacuvius, already quoted. This natural grace, however, was, even in Greek poetry, superseded by a more artificial style.
In this year a colony was settled at Vibo, in pursuance of a decree of the senate and an order of the people; three thousand seven hundred footmen, and three hundred horsemen, went out thither, conducted by the commissioners Quintus Naevius, Marcus Minucius, and Marcus Furius Crassipes. Fifteen acres of ground were assigned to each footman, double that quantity to a horseman.
He seems to have been a personage with an immense head, who, corresponding to our clown or harlequin, came in for many hard knocks, but was a general favourite. Pappus took the place of pantaloon, and was the general butt. Several fragments remain, but for many centuries they were taken for those of Naevius, whence great confusion ensued.
On the contrary, it may be conjectured from what we otherwise know of the character of the three chief races of Italy, that in artistic gifts the Samnites approached nearest to the Hellenes and the Etruscans were farthest removed from them; and a sort of confirmation of this hypothesis is furnished by the fact, that the most gifted and most original of the Roman poets, such as Naevius, Ennius, Lucilius, and Horace, belonged to the Samnite lands, whereas Etruria has almost no representatives in Roman literature except the Arretine Maecenas, the most insufferable of all heart-withered and affected court-poets, and the Volaterran Persius, the true ideal of a conceited and languid, poetry-smitten, youth.
Such a man will not, after the example, of old Albutius, be savage while he assigns to his servants their respective offices; nor, like simple Naevius, will he offer greasy water to his company: for this too is a great fault. Now learn what and how great benefits a temperate diet will bring along with it.
But in this, Attius was so far mistaken, that Ennius, when the persons above-mentioned were Consuls, was forty years old: so that if Livius was of the same age, as in this case he would have been, the first dramatic author we had must have been younger than Plautus and Naevius, who had exhibited a great number of plays before the time he specifies.
Ennius proposed to himself the very same task as Naevius; but the similarity of the subject only brings out into stronger relief the political and poetical contrast between the national and the anti- national poet. Naevius sought out for the new subject a new form; Ennius fitted or forced it into the forms of the Hellenic epos.
But the Roman police was not disposed like the Attic to hold stage- invectives and political diatribes as privileged, or even to tolerate them at all. Naevius was put in prison for these and similar sallies, and was obliged to remain there, till he had publicly made amends and recantation in other comedies.
Of Naevius and Plautus, it is true, nothing of the kind is known; the popular poets in Rome must have treated orthography and etymology with the indifference which is usual with poets. Rhetoric and Philosophy The Romans of this epoch still remained strangers to rhetoric and philosophy.
But that is a trifle compared with the following specimen. In Menander's -Plocium- a husband bewails his troubles to his friend: In the Latin edition of Caecilius, this conversation, so elegant in its simplicity, is converted into the following uncouth dialogue: III. XIII. Increase of Amusements The personal notices of Naevius are sadly confused.
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