of their generals: of which we have an example, in the triumph of Julius Cæsar over Gaul, in these expressions: Cesar Gallias subegit, Nicomedes Casarem. Ecce Cæsar nunc triumphat, qui subegit Gallias: Nicomedes non triumphat, qui subegit Cæsarem. The vapours of wine made those first satirical poets amongst the Romans; which, says Dacier, we cannot better represent, than by imagining a company of clowns on a holiday, dancing lubberly, and upbraiding one another, in extempore doggrel, with their defects and vices, and the stories that were told of them in bake-houses and barbers' shops.

When they began to be somewhat better bred, and were entering, as I may say, into the first rudiments of civil conversation, they left these hedgenotes for another sort of poem, somewhat polished, which was also full of pleasant raillery, but without any mixture of obscenity. This sort of poetry appeared under the name of satire, because of its variety; and this satire was adorned with compositions of music, and with dances; but lascivious postures were banished from it. In the Tuscan language, says Livy, the word hister signifies a player; and therefore those actors, which were first brought from Etruria to Rome, on occasion of a pestilence, when the Romans were admonished to avert the anger of the Gods by plays, in the year ab Urbe Condita cccxc.,-those actors, I say, were therefore called histriones; and that name has since remained, not only to actors Roman born, but to all others of every nation. They played not the former extempore stuff of Fescennine verses, or clownish jests; but what they acted was a kind of civil, cleanly farce, with music and dances, and motions that were proper to the subject.

In this condition Livius Andronicus found the stage, when he attempted first, instead of farces, to

supply it with a nobler entertainment of tragedies and comedies. This man was a Grecian born, and being made a slave by Livius Salinator, and brought to Rome, had the education of his patron's children committed to him; which trust he discharged so much to the satisfaction of his master, that he him his liberty.

gave

Andronicus, thus become a freeman of Rome, added to his own name that of Livius his master; and, as I observed, was the first author of a regular play in that commonwealth. Being already instructed, in his native country, in the manners and decencies of the Athenian theatre, and conversant in the Archæa comedia, or old comedy of Aristophanes, and the rest of the Grecian poets, he took from that model his own designing of plays for the Roman stage; the first of which was represented in the year cccccxiv., since the building of Rome, as Tully, from the commentaries of Atticus, has assured us it was after the end of the first Punic

war, the year before Ennius was born. Dacier has not carried the matter altogether thus far; he only says, that one Livius Andronicus was the first stage-poet at Rome. But I will adventure on this hint, to advance another proposition, which I hope the learned will approve. And though we have not any thing of Andronicus remaining to justify my conjecture, yet it is exceedingly probable, that, having read the works of those Grecian wits, his countrymen, he imitated not only the ground work, but also the manner of their writing; and how grave soever his tragedies might be, yet, in his comedies, he expressed the way of Aristophanes, Eupolis, and the rest, which was to call some persons by their own names, and to expose their defects to the laughter of the people: the examples of which we have in the fore-mentioned Aristophanes, who

turned the wise Socrates into ridicule, and is also very free with the management of Cleon, Alcibiades, and other ministers of the Athenian government. Now, if this be granted, we may easily suppose, that the first hint of satirical plays on the Roman stage was given by the Greeks: not from the Satirica, for that has been reasonably exploded in the former part of this discourse; but from their old comedy, which was imitated first by Livius Andronicus. And then Quintilian and Horace must be cautiously interpreted, where they affirm, that satire is wholly Roman, and a sort of verse, which was not touched on by the Grecians. The reconcilement of my opinion to the standard of their judgment is not, however, very difficult, since they spoke of satire, not as in its first elements, but as it was formed into a separate work; begun by Ennius, pursued by Lucilius, and completed afterwards by Horace. The proof depends only on this postulatum,-that the comedies of Andronicus, which were imitations of the Greek, were also imitations of their railleries, and reflections on particular persons. For, if this be granted me, which is a most probable supposition, it is easy to infer, that the first light which was given to the Roman theatrical satire, was from the plays of Livius Andronicus; which will be more manifestly discovered, when I come to speak of Ennius. In the meantime I will return to Dacier.

The people, says he, ran in crowds to these new entertainments of Andronicus, as to pieces which were more noble in their kind, and more pertect than their former satires, which for some time they neglected and abandoned. But not long after, they took them up again, and then they joined them to their comedies; playing them at the end of every drama, as the French continue at this

day to act their farces, in the nature of a separate entertainment from their tragedies. But more particularly they were joined to the Atellane fables, says Casaubon; which were plays invented by the Osci. Those fables, says Valerius Maximus, out of Livy, were tempered with the Italian severity, and free from any note of infamy, or obsceneness; and, as an old commentator of Juvenal affirms, the Exodiarii, which were singers and dancers, entered to entertain the people with light songs, and mimical gestures, that they might not go away oppressed with melancholy, from those serious pieces of the theatre. So that the ancient satire of the Romans was in extempore reproaches; the next was farce, which was brought from Tuscany; to that succeeded the plays of Andronicus, from the old comedy of the Grecians; and out of all these sprung two several branches of new Roman satire, like different scions from the same root, which I shall prove with as much brevity as the subject will allow.

A year after Andronicus had opened the Roman stage with his new dramas, Ennius was born; who, when he was grown to man's estate, having seriously considered the genius of the people, and how eagerly they followed the first satires, thought it would be worth his pains to refine upon the project, and to write Satires, not to be acted on the theatre, but read. He preserved the ground-work of their pleasantry, their venom, and their raillery on particular persons, and general vices; and by this means, avoiding the danger of any ill success in a public representation, he hoped to be as well received in the cabinet, as Andronicus had been upon the stage. The event was answerable to his expectation. He made discourses in several sorts of verse, varied often in the same paper; retaining

still in the title their original name of Satire. Both in relation to the subjects, and the variety of matters contained in them, the Satires of Horace are entirely like them; only Ennius, as I said, confines not himself to one sort of verse, as Horace does; but, taking example from the Greeks, and even from Homer himself in his MARGITES, which is a kind of Satire, as Scaliger observes, gives himself the licence, when one sort of numbers comes not easily, to run into another, as his fancy dictates. For he makes no difficulty to mingle hexameter with iambick trimeters, or with trochaick tetrameters; as appears by those fragments which are yet remaining of him. Horace has thought him. worthy to be copied; inserting many things of his into his own Satires, as Virgil has done into his Eneids.

Here we have Dacier making out that Ennius was the first satirist in that way of writing, which was of his invention; that is, satire abstracted from the stage, and new modelled into papers of verses on several subjects. But he will have Ennius take the ground-work of satire from the first farces of the Romans, rather than from the formed plays of Livius Andronicus, which were copied from the Grecian comedies. It may possibly be so; but Dacier knows no more of it than I do. And it seems to me the more probable opinion, that he rather imitated the fine railleries of the Greeks, which he saw in the pieces of Andronicus, than the coarseness of his old country-men, in their clownish extemporary way of jeering.

But besides this, it is universally granted, that Ennius, though an Italian, was excellently learned in the Greek language. His verses were stuffed with fragments of it, even to a fault; and he himself believed, according to the Pythagorean opinion,