It has been objected to Terence that he superabounds in soliloquies;[228] but it is not surprising that he should have delighted in them, since no author ever surpassed him in narrative. His natural and unaffected simplicity renders him the best possible teller of a story: he never indulges in a display of forced wit or in attempts at epigrammatic sharpness; there are no superfluous touches, although his pictures are enlivened by sufficient minuteness; his moral lessons are conveyed in familiar proverb-like suggestions, not in dull and pedantic dogmatism. The remaining comic poets will require but brief notice. L. Afranius was a contemporary of Terence, and flourished about B. C. 150. His comedies were all of the lowest class of _fabulæ togatæ_ (tabernariæ;) and he was generally allowed by the critics to possess great skill in accommodating the Greek comedy to the representation of Roman manners:—— Dicitur Afrani _toga_ convenisse Menandro. _Hor. Ep._ II. i. 57. His style was short and eloquent (_perargutus et disertus_,)[229] but he was a man of low tastes and profligate morals;[230] and, therefore, although, from living amidst the scenes of vulgar vice which he delighted to paint, his characters were true to nature, they were revolting and disgusting. His immorality, probably, as much as his talent, caused him to continue a favourite under the most corrupt times of the empire. Fragments and titles of many of his comedies have been preserved. The name of Atilius is made known to us by Cicero, who mentions him three times. In a letter to Atticus,[231] he calls him a most crabbed poet (_poeta durissimus_,) and quotes the following line from one of his comedies:— Suam cuique sponsam, mihi meam; suum cuique amorem, mihi meum. In the treatise “_De Finibus_,”[232] he speaks of him as the author of a bad translation of the Electra of Sophocles, and refers to the testimony of Licinius, who pronounces him as “hard as iron”—— Ferreum scriptorem; verum opinor; scriptorem tamen Ut legendus sit; and, lastly, in the “Tusculan Disputations,”[233] he gives the title of one of his plays—Μισογυνος (the Woman-hater.) Of his birth and private history nothing has been recorded. P. Licinius Tegula is generally supposed to have been one of the oldest of the Latin comic writers, having flourished as early as the beginning of the second century B. C. The few fragments which remain of his works afford no opportunity of determining how far he deserved the place assigned to him in the epigram of Volcatius.