EARLY ITALIAN POPULAR COMEDY

THE traditional date of the founding of Rome was 753 B.C. and more than five hundred years elapsed before a Greek named Livius Andronicus adapted a Greek tragedy and a Greek comedy for presentation on the Roman stage. This date, 240 B.C., is important, for it marks not only the appearance of Greek drama at Rome but also the beginning of formal Latin literature. Latin prose and verse had appeared earlier in primitive form (e.g., laws, maxims, religious songs, dirges, epitaphs) and had been slowly developing throughout the centuries; the linguistic medium was being prepared for the time when a sudden impetus would make literary creation inevitable.

In the early days of the Republic the Romans were too busily engaged in the mastery of their environment to give much thought to cultural pursuits. Gradually they consolidated their position as the ruling people of the Italian peninsula and in so doing came into closer contact with the Greeks of southern Italy. The first Punic war (264-241 B.C.) gave the Romans a knowledge of Greek life and culture in Sicily, and their victory over Carthage, which marked the beginning of their expansion as a world power, may have brought to them a self-consciousness, a realization of their own cultural deficiencies and what would be expected of them as a great nation. Certainly it is no accident that the regular production r>f tragedies and comedies at Rome began in 240 B.C., one year after the conclusion of the war. The necessary stimulus to literary activity had arrived. Whether the dramatic presentations were primarily to satisfy the desires of soldiers who had seen Greek tragedies and comedies at Syracuse and elsewhere or whether the plays reflected a more general realization that the cultural development of the Romans had not kept pace with their political prestige is difficult to decide. The fact that Livius Andronicus also translated the Odyssey into Latin for use in schools reveals an increasing concern for better educational methods. From this time on for the next hundred years epic and drama remained the chief concern of the Roman poets.

The beginnings of Roman literature are sometimes criticized as imitation and translation but it is worth recalling that the Greeks by the third century B.C. had already invented, developed, and brought to a state of perfection almost every conceivable literary form — epic, drama (both tragedy and comedy), lyric, elegy, epigram, pastoral, history, oratory, philosophical dialogue and treatise. The literature of ancient Greece is the one truly original European literature and in a broad sense all later literatures of western Europe are and must be imitative in that they are all indebted to Greece, directly or indirectly, for their literary forms. The Romans had nothing of their own that deserved the name of literature and so, when they came into contact with Greek culture and Greek literature, they were naturally eager to imitate and adapt the Greek masterpieces. The Romans may have lost some strength and realism by their generous use of Greek writers but they doubtless saved much time by entering quickly on their heritage, and early writers like Naevius and Plautus brought vigor and originality to the literary types taken over from the Greeks.

It is well to remember that of all the peoples of the period who came into contact with the Greeks only the Romans had the maturity and the imagination to assimilate and carry on the culture of their Greek neighbors. The very beginnings of Roman literature were audacious and merit our admiration. A new art was developed — the art of translation. To transfer a literary work from one language to another was in itself a new idea and a bold undertaking at a time when the Latin tongue had not yet attained a truly poetic expression. Livius Andronicus and his successors, Naevius, Plautus, and Ennius, did much to make Latin a more flexible and melodious medium. They mark the beginnings of a development in the language which did not reach its culmination until the days of Cicero and Vergil.

Although 240 B.C. is the all important date for the beginning of Roman literature, we must believe that the ground had already been prepared for the introduction of formal drama. The very fact that there were theatrical performances and a theater-going public in 240 B.C. implies that some form of dramatic activity existed prior to this date. Our first concern will be to describe the nature of this drama, as accurately as can be determined, and to discover what influence, if any, this primitive, non-literary drama may have had upon Roman comedy of the second century B.C.

Horace and Livy on Early Drama

The ancient Romans, like the modern Italians, had a fondness for gesticulation and mimicry, and it is difficult to conceive of primitive festivals without some form of song and dance in which the mimetic element played a part. The poet Horace in a famous passage (Epistles 11, 1, 139-163) describes the farmers resting from their toil and making sacrifices to their gods in a rural harvest festival, on which occasion they uttered rustic jests of an abusive nature in alternate verse, and Horace refers to this practice as Fescennina licentia. These Fescennine verses, he says, developed into so scurrilous a form (iam saevus apertam in rabiem verti iocus) that they were restrained by law, after which they again lapsed into a form of harmless entertainment (ad bene dicendum delectandumque redacti). Then Horace utters the famous sentence: "Conquered Greece took captive her fierce conqueror and brought the arts to rustic Latium," and states that after the Punic wars the Romans turned to the pages of the Greeks and began to search for the useful matter to be found in Sophocles, Thespis, and Aeschylus. He admits, however, that traces of the earlier rustic verses (vestigia ruris) have survived to his own day.

Horace thus ascribes to rural festivals the origin of a crude form of dramatic dialogue in verse, and gives also a brief history of its development prior to the importation of Greek drama. He does not mention the name of Livius Andronicus, and the references to Greek drama seem to be entirely to tragedy.

Much more is learned about the early history of drama at Rome from an important and much discussed passage in Livy's History of Rome (VII, 2), which gives a very different...