had little or no place. Thus the Atellane plays (so called from Atella, a small town in Campania) admirably suited the unindividualised life of early Rome, for their principal personages were not "characters" in the modern artistic sense, but fixed types. Such are Maccus, Pappus, Bucco, Dossenus, and the peculiarly Roman Mania, Lamia, Pytho, Manducus. Maccus, for example, is a stupid glutton wearing ass's ears; Pappus, a vain old man constantly cheated by his wife and son; Dossenus, a cunning sharper. These typical personages remind us of the Cain[1] or the "Vice with his dagger of lath" in our old morality plays, and like them belong to an age in which personality was weakly realised. It is to be remembered that the diction of the Atellane plays, like that of the Mimes, was plebeian—an index to the popular character of these rude dramatic spectacles.
But the plebeians were not destined to be the makers of Roman comedy, much less of Roman literature in general, nor were such types as Maccus and Pappus to be individualised by the internal evolution of Roman society. The increase of Roman wealth and consequent pressure of strangers to Rome from the era of the First Punic War reproduced, but within a relatively narrower circle, the effects of the great Persian War on Athenian mind; and among the earliest of these effects was the discovery of Rome's literary nakedness compared with the intellectual riches of Greece. How to convey some of this intellectual wealth to Rome and there give it currency became the literary problem of the day; and
- ↑ Shakspere's expression, "Cain-coloured beard" (Merry Wives, I. iv.), referring to the red hair worn by this stock personage of the morality-plays, reminds us of the custom on the Roman stage for old men to appear in white wigs (e.g. "Periplecomenus albicapillus," in the Miles Gloriosus) and slaves in red (e.g. "Si quis me quæret rufus," in the Phormio)—a custom probably derived from the typical dresses of the stock personages in the old comedy of Rome.
