well as its vigour. The “Brutus” was written at the suggestion of his friend Decimus. The plot was the expulsion of the Tarquins, the hero Brutus, the heroine Lucretia. He had chosen one of the noblest romances in Roman history. Two passages,[269] quoted by Cicero, are all that remain of this national tragedy. In them the tyrant relates to the augurs a dream which had haunted him, and they, at his request, give their interpretation of it. Varro has also preserved the soliloquy of Hercules in the agonies of death, from the Trachiniæ,[270] a noble paraphrase of Sophocles. This fine specimen of his genius extends to the length of forty-five lines. In another passage, Philoctetes pours forth his sufferings in language as touching as the original Greek; and in a third, Prometheus, now delivered from the tyranny of Jupiter, addresses to his assembled Titans a strain of indignant eloquence not unworthy of Æschylus.[271] The following lines from the “Phœnissæ” and the “Complaint of Philoctetes,” are, though brief, fair examples of his language and versification:—— Sol, qui micantem candido curru atque equis Flammam citatis fervido ardore explicas, Quianam tam adverso augurio et inimico omine Thebis radiatum lumen ostendis tuum![272] Heu! quis salsis fluctibus mandet Me ex sublimi vertice saxi, Jamjam absumor; conficit animam Vis volneris, ulceris æstus.[273] These are the most important of the numerous fragments which are extant of the various tragedies of the lofty Attius.[274] He has been considered by some as the founder of the _Tragœdia Prætextatæ_. This, however, is not true, for there is no doubt that such dramas were written by his predecessors. Nevertheless, he brought the natural tragedy to its highest state of perfection. The time was now evidently approaching when the Romans were beginning to show, that although they did not possess the inventive genius of the Greeks, they were capable of stripping their native language of its rudeness, and of transferring into it the beauties of Greek thought; that they were no longer mere servile copyists, but could use Greek poetry as furnishing suggestions for original efforts. They could not quarry for themselves, but they could now build up Greek materials into a glowing and polished edifice, of which the details were new and the effect original. The metres which Attius used were chiefly the iambic trimeter and the anapæstic dimeter, but his _prætextatæ_ were written in trochaic and iambic tetrameters, the rhythm of which proves that his ear was more refined than that of his predecessors.[275]