force he owed to the qualities in him that make his tragedy transgress
the formal limits of the art, to pass into the wider sphere of the human
comedy, with its tears and laughter, its sentiment and passions. From him
to Menander is in truth but a step; but this step was of such importance
that it was the comedian who became the Shakespeare of Greece. _Omnem
vitae imaginem expressit_ are the words deliberately used of him by the
greatest of Roman critics.

When, therefore, the impulse towards a national literature began to be
felt at Rome, comedy took its place side by side with tragedy and epic as
part of the Greek secret that had to be studied and mastered; and this
came the more naturally that a sort of comedy in rude but definite forms
was already native and familiar. Dramatic improvisations were, from an
immemorial antiquity, a regular feature of Italian festivals. They were
classed under different heads, which cannot be sharply distinguished. The
_Satura_ seems to have been peculiarly Latin; probably it did not differ
deeply or essentially from the two other leading types that arose north
and south of Latium, and were named from the little country towns of
Fescennium in Etruria, and Atella in Campania. But these rude
performances hardly rose to the rank of literature; and here, as
elsewhere, the first literary standard was set by laborious translations
from the Greek.

We find, accordingly, that the earlier masters--Andronicus, Naevius,
Ennius--all wrote comedies as well as tragedies, of the type known as
_palliata_, or "dressed in the Greek mantle," that is to say, freely
translated or adapted from Greek originals. After Ennius, this still
continued to be the more usual type; but the development of technical
skill now results in two important changes. The writers of comedy become,
on the whole and broadly speaking, distinct from the writers of tragedy;