to write busily till after the end of the second Punic War, and left the
Latin drama thoroughly established. Only inconsiderable fragments of his
writings survive; but it is certain that he was a figure of really great
distinction. Though not a man of birth himself, he had the skill and
courage to match himself against the great house of the Metelli. The
Metelli, it is true, won the battle; Naevius was imprisoned, and finally
died in exile; but he had established literature as a real force in Rome.
Aulus Gellius has preserved the haughty verses which he wrote to be
engraved on his own tomb--

_Immortelles mortales si foret fas flere
Flerent divae Camenae Naevium poetam;
Itaque postquam est Orci traditus thesauro
Obliti sunt Romai loquier lingua Latina._

The Latin Muses were, indeed, then in the full pride and hope of a
vigorous and daring youth. The greater part of Naevius' plays, both in
tragedy and comedy, were, it is true, translated or adapted from Greek
originals; but alongside of these,--the _Danae_, the _Iphigenia_, the
_Andromache_, which even his masculine genius can hardly have made more
than pale reflexes of Euripides--were new creations, "plays of the purple
stripe," as they came to be called, where he wakened a tragic note from
the legendary or actual history of the Roman race. His _Alimonium Romuli
et Remi_, though it may have borrowed much from the kindred Greek legends
of Danae or Melanippe, was one of the foundation-stones of a new national
literature; in the tragedy of _Clastidium_, the scene was laid in his own
days, and the action turned on an incident at once of national importance
and of romantic personal heroism--a great victory won over the Gallic
tribes of Northern Italy, and the death of the Gallic chief in single
combat at the hand of the Roman consul.