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6. IV. XI. Token-Money.
7. III. XIV. National Comedy.
8. External circumstances also, it may be presumed, co-operated in bringing about this change. After all the Italian communities had obtained the Roman franchise in consequence of the Social war, it was no longer allowable to transfer the scene of a comedy to any such community, and the poet had either to keep to general ground or to choose places that had fallen into ruin or were situated abroad. Certainly this circumstance, which was taken into account even in the production of the older comedies, exercised an unfavourable effect on the national comedy.
9. I. XV. Masks.
10. With these names there has been associated from ancient times a series of errors. The utter mistake of Greek reporters, that these farces were played at Rome in the Oscan language, is now with justice universally rejected; but it is, on a closer consideration, little short of impossible to bring these pieces, which are laid in the midst of Latin town and country life, into relation with the national Oscan character at all. The appellation of "Atellan play" is to be explained in another way. The Latin farce with its fixed characters and standing jests needed a permanent scenery: the fool-world everywhere seeks for itself a local habitation. Of course under the Roman stage-police none of the Roman communities, or of the Latin communities allied with Rome, could be taken for this purpose, although it was allowable to transfer the togatae to these. But Atella, which, although destroyed de jure along with Capua in 543 (III. VI. Capua Capitulates, III. VI. In Italy), continued practically to subsist as a village inhabited by Roman farmers, was adapted in every respect for the purpose. This conjecture is changed into certainty by our observing that several of these farces are laid in other communities within the domain of the Latin tongue, which existed no longer at all, or no longer at any rate in the eye of the law-such as the Campani of Pomponius and perhaps also his Adelphi and his Quinquatria in Capua, and the Milites Pometinenses of Novius in Suessa Pometia - while no existing community was subjected to similar maltreatment. The real home of these pieces was therefore Latium, their poetical stage was the Latinized Oscan land; with the Oscan nation they have no co
11. The close and original co
12. In the time of the empire the Atellana was represented by professional actors (Friedlander in Becker's Handbuch. vi. 549). The time at which these began to engage in it is not reported, but it can hardly have been other than the time at which the Atellan was admitted among the regular stage-plays, i. e. the epoch before Cicero (Cic. ad Fam. ix. 16). This view is not inconsistent with the circumstance that still in Livy's time (vii. 2) the Atellan players retained their honorary rights as contrasted with other actors; for the statement that professional actors began to take part in performing the Atellana for pay does not imply that the Atellana was no longer performed, in the country towns for instance, by unpaid amateurs, and the privilege therefore still remained applicable.
13. It deserves attention that the Greek farce was not only especially at home in Lower Italy, but that several of its pieces (e. g. among those of Sopater, the "Lentile-Porridge", the "Wooers of Bacchis", the "Valet of Mystakos", the "Bookworms", the "Physiologist") strikingly remind us of the Atellanae. This composition of farces must have reached down to the time at which the Greeks in and around Neapolis formed a circle enclosed within the Latin-speaking Campania; for one of these writers of farces, Blaesus of Capreae, bears even a Roman name and wrote a farce "Saturnus."
14. According to Eusebius, Pomponius flourished about 664; Velleius calls him a contemporary of Lucius Crassus (614-663) and Marcus Antonius (611-667). The former statement is probably about a generation too late; the reckoning by victoriati (p. 182) which was discontinued about 650 still occurs in his Pictores, and about the end of this period we already meet the mimes which displaced the Atellanae from the stage.
15. It was probably merry enough in this form. In the Phoenissae of Novius, for instance, there was the line: Sume arma, iam te occidam clava scirpea, Just as Menander's Pseudeirakleis makes his appearance.
16. Hitherto the person providing the play had been obliged to fit up the stage and scenic apparatus out of the round sum assigned to him or at his own expense, and probably much money would not often be expended on these. But in 580 the censors made the erection of the stage for the games of the praetors and aediles a matter of special contract (Liv. xli. 27); the circumstance that the stage-apparatus was now no longer erected merely for a single performance must have led to a perceptible improvement of it.