fancy and richness of phrase which was marked as his distinctive quality
by the great critic Varro. Only one Roman play (on Lucius Aemilius
Paulus, the conqueror of Pydna[1]) is mentioned among his pieces; and
this, though perhaps accidental, may indicate that tragedy had not really
pushed its roots deep enough at Rome, and was destined to an early decay.
Inexhaustible as is the life and beauty of the old Greek mythology, it
was impossible that a Roman audience should be content to listen for age
after age to the stories of Atalanta and Antiope, Pentheus and Orestes,
while they had a new national life and overwhelming native interests of
their own. The Greek tragedy tended more and more to become the merely
literary survival that it was in France under Louis Quatorze, that it has
been in our own day in the hands of Mr. Arnold or Mr. Swinburne. But one
more poet of remarkable genius carries on its history into the next age.

Lucius Accius of Pisaurum produced one of his early plays in the year 140
B.C., on the same occasion when one of his latest was produced by
Pacuvius, then an old man of eighty. Accius reached a like age himself;
Cicero as a young man knew him well, and used to relate incidents of the
aged poet's earlier life which he had heard from his own lips. For the
greater part of the fifty years which include Sulla and the Gracchi,
Accius was the recognised literary master at Rome, president of the
college of poets which held its meetings in the temple of Minerva on the
Aventine, and associating on terms of full equality with the most
distinguished statesmen. A doubtful tradition mentions him as having also
written an epic, or at least a narrative poem, called _Annales_, like
that of Ennius; but this in all likelihood is a distorted reflection of
the fact that he handed down and developed the great literary tradition
left by his predecessor. The volume of his dramatic work was very great;
the titles are preserved of no less than forty-five tragedies. In general
estimation he brought Roman tragedy to its highest point. The fragments