of chiefs where individual character is surrounded by a divine halo which the democratic intercourse of the city cannot tolerate.
§ 52. The semi-dramatic Fescennine Dialogues, the Saturæ, Mimes, and Fabulæ Atellana (the last, according to Livy, exclusively in the hands of freeborn citizens and not polluted by professional actors), show that even at the beginnings of Roman literature city life, in spite of gentile aristocracy, was roughly producing its characteristic literary product—the drama. But here, too, the patrician clan spirit opposed the progress of the Camenæ and left a clear way for the Muses of Greece. It would have been untrue to Roman social life to have exhibited as Roman the relations of father and son, husband and wife, as Plautus and Terence borrowing from Greek models exhibit them always on a thoroughly Greek stage. The scene of the Amphitruo is at Thebes, of the Asinaria probably at Athens, of the Aulularia at Athens; of the Bacchides, Casina, Epidicus, Mercator, Mostellaria, Persa, Pseudolus, Stichus, Trinumus, Truculentus, at Athens; that of the Captivi in Ætolia, of the Cistellaria at Sicyon, of the Curculio at Epidaurus, of the Menæchmi at Epidamnus, of the Miles Gloriosus at Ephesus, of the Panulus at Calydon, of the Rudens in Africa near Cyrenæ; so that not one of the twenty extant plays attributed to Plautus has its action in Italy, much less in Rome. The Greek places, names, characters, of the Plautine and Terentian dramas are to be accounted for not merely by the desire of avoiding offence and by their close imitation of Greek models, but also by the comparative absence of such characters and personal relations at Rome as would suit the dramatist. Neither the Roman son, whose peculium reminds us rather of a slave's status than that of a free man, nor the Roman father, with the
