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Latin Literature by J. W. (John William) Mackail
page 16 of 298 (05%)
and alongside of the _palliata_ springs up the _togata_, or comedy of
Italian dress, persons, and manners.

As this latter form of Latin comedy has perished, with the exception of
trifling fragments, it may be dismissed here in few words. Its life was
comprised in less than a century. Titinius, the first of the writers of
the _fabula togata_ of whom we have any certain information, was a
contemporary of Terence and the younger Scipio; a string of names, which
are names and nothing more, carries us down to the latest and most
celebrated of the list, Lucius Afranius. His middle-class comedies
achieved a large and a long-continued popularity; we hear of performances
of them being given even a hundred years after his death, and Horace
speaks with gentle sarcasm of the enthusiasts who put him on a level with
Menander. With his contemporary Quinctius Atta (who died B.C. 77, in the
year of the abortive revolution after the death of Sulla), he owed much
of his success to the admirable acting of Roscius, who created a stage
tradition that lasted long after his own time. To the mass of the people,
comedy (though it did not err in the direction of over-refinement) seemed
tame by comparison with the shows and pageants showered on them by the
ruling class as the price of their suffrages. As in other ages and
countries, fashionable society followed the mob. The young man about
town, so familiar to us from the brilliant sketches of Ovid, accompanies
his mistress, not to comedies of manners, but to the more exciting
spectacles of flesh and blood offered by the ballet-dancers and the
gladiators. Thus the small class who occupied themselves with literature
had little counteracting influence pressed on them to keep them from the
fatal habit of perpetually copying from the Greek; and adaptations from
the Attic New Comedy, which had been inevitable and proper enough as the
earlier essays of a tentative dramatic art, remained the staple of an art
which thus cut itself definitely away from nature.
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