of their native city. Hence it was to be expected from the first that the development of literature would fall into the hands of the upper classes as soon as Greek influences acquired their certain mastery at Rome. It was also to be expected that the drama—a form of literature which loses its vitality in proportion as it becomes the property of a class—would undergo some strange transformation in passing from its Roman cradle into the adult life of the New Comedy. Since this transformation, so far as the present writer is acquainted, is unparalleled[1] in the literary history of the world, and illustrates the progressive individualisation of Roman life, we shall discuss its nature at some length.
The great difficulties which Livius and Nævius had experienced in their attempts to Romanise the Greek drama had been the rude form and spirit of Roman literature in its "barbarous" state. The Saturnian measure was altogether inadequate to translate the Greek metres. Character-types, like Manducus, were altogether inadequate to express Greek personality. Were Greek metres, Greek characters, Greek ideas of place and time, to be transferred en masse from Athens to Rome? And, if all this had to be done, how were Roman associations to be kept from intruding when the language used was to be Latin and not Greek? These were the problems which Plautus faced and Terence solved; and it is because the plays of the former represent the transition from the Roman to the Greek
- ↑ The Japanese drama is by some supposed to have been borrowed from the Chinese; but, even granting the truth of this supposition, these Eastern dramas are not sufficiently developed, and do not reflect states of society sufficiently developed, to be compared with the dramatic relations of Rome and Greece. And if the influence of the French drama on the Russian be cited as a parallel, we must remember that this influence of the French has been modified by that of the English and German dramas.
