show a grace and fancy which we can hardly trace in the earlier
tragedians.

Accius was the last, as he seems to have been the greatest, of his race.
Tragedy indeed continued, as we shall see, to be written and even to be
acted. The literary men of the Ciceronian and Augustan age published
their plays as a matter of course; Varius was coupled by his
contemporaries with Virgil and Horace; and the lost _Medea_ of Ovid, like
the never-finished _Ajax_ of Augustus, would be at the least a highly
interesting literary document. But the new age found fresh poetical forms
into which it could put its best thought and art; while a blow was struck
directly at the roots of tragedy by the new invention, in the hands of
Cicero and his contemporaries, of a grave, impassioned, and stately
prose.




II.

COMEDY: PLAUTUS AND TERENCE.


Great as was the place occupied in the culture of the Greek world by
Homer and the Attic tragedians, the Middle and New Comedy, as they
culminated in Menander, exercised an even wider and more pervasive
influence. A vast gap lay between the third and fifth centuries before
Christ. Aeschylus, and even Sophocles, had become ancient literature in
the age immediately following their own. Euripides, indeed, continued for
centuries after his death to be a vital force of immense moment; but this