To such a people the moral woes of tragedy were powerless; and yet it is to the people that the drama, if it is to flourish, must look for patronage. A refined and educated society, such as always existed at Rome during its literary period, might applaud a happy adaptation from the Greek tragedians, and encourage a poet in his task—for it is only an educated and refined taste which can appreciate such talent as skilful imitation displays; but a tragic drama under such circumstances could hardly hope to be national. Nor must it be forgotten, with reference to their taste for spectacle, that the artistic accessories of the drama would have a better chance of success with a people like the Romans than literary merit, because the pleasures of art are of a lower and more sensuous kind. Hence, in the popular eye, the decoration of the theatre and the costume of the performers naturally became the principal requisites, whilst the poet’s office was considered subordinate to the manner in which the play was put upon the stage; and thus the degenerate theatrical taste which prevailed in the days of Horace called forth the poet’s well-known and well-deserved criticism.[245] It cannot, indeed, be asserted that tragedy was never, to a certain extent, an acceptable entertainment at Rome, but only that it never flourished at Rome as it did at Athens—that no Roman tragedies can, notwithstanding all that has been said in their praise and their defence, be compared with those of Greece, and that the tragic drama never maintained such a hold on the popular mind as not to be liable to be displaced by amusements of a more material and less intellectual kind. It was imitative and destitute of originality. It was introduced from without as one portion of the new literature; it did not grow spontaneously by a process of natural development out of preceding eras of epic and lyric poetry, and start into being, as it did at Athens, at the very moment when the public mind and taste was ready to receive and appreciate it.