elegance of his Latin and the fine drawing of his characters, was a
failure with popular audiences owing to his lack of broad farcical
humour. Plautus with his coarse geniality and lumbering wit made a
greater success. He had grafted the festive spirit of Roman farce on to
the more artistic comedy of Athens. Tragedy obtained but a passing
vogue. Ennius, Accius, and Pacuvius were read and enjoyed by not a few
educated readers, but for the Augustan age, as far as the stage was
concerned, they were practically dead and buried. The Roman populace
had by that period lost all taste for the highest and most refined
forms of art. The races in the circus, the variety entertainments and
bloodshed of the amphitheatre had captured the favour of the polyglot,
pampered multitude that must have formed such a large proportion of a
Roman audience.

Still, dramatic entertainments had by no means wholly disappeared by the
time of the Empire. But what remained was of a degraded type. The New
Comedy of Athens, as transferred to the Roman stage, had given ground
before the advance of the mime and the _fabula Atellana_. The history of
both these forms of comedy belongs to an earlier period. For the
post-Augustan age our evidence as to their development is very scanty.
Little is known save that they were exceedingly popular. Both were
characterized by the broadest farce and great looseness of construction;
both were brief one-act pieces and served as interludes or conclusions
to other forms of spectacle.

The Atellan was of Italian origin and contained four stock characters,
Pappus the old man or pantaloon, Dossennus the wise man, corresponding
to the _dottore_ of modern Italian popular comedy, Bucco the clown, and
Maccus the fool. It dealt with every kind of theme, parodied the legends
of the gods, laughed at the provincial's manners or at the inhabitants