[Sidenote: Lucius Accius.] The last important writer of tragedies, and probably the greatest of all, was Lucius Accius, of Pisaurum, in Umbria. He was born in 170 B. C., and one of his first tragedies was produced in 140 B. C., when Pacuvius produced one of his last. Accius lived to a great age, but the date of his death is not known. Cicero, as a young man, was well acquainted with him, and used to listen to his stories of his own early years. The shortness of the life of Roman tragedy, and the rapidity with which Roman literature developed, may be seen by observing that Cicero, the great master of Latin prose, knew Accius, whose birth took place only thirty-four years after the death of Livius Andronicus. Of the plays of Accius somewhat more than 700 lines are preserved, and about fifty titles are known. The fragments are for the most part detached lines, but some are long enough to let us see that the poet had a vigorous and graceful style, and a vivid imagination. Like most of his predecessors, Accius wrote various minor poems, and was interested in the development of the Latin language. He proposed a number of innovations, including some changes in the alphabet, but these last were not adopted by others. Besides his tragedies translated from the Greek, he wrote at least two _fabulæ prætextæ_, the _Brutus_, in which he dramatized the tale of the expulsion of the Tarquins, and _Æneadæ_, glorifying the death of Publius Decius Mus at the battle of Sentinum in 295 B. C. Even in his regular tragedies he departed occasionally from the original Greek so far as to show his own power of invention, though these plays were for the most part mere free translations. One of the longer fragments,[6] in which a shepherd, who has never seen a ship before, describes the coming of the Argo, may give some idea of Accius’s skill in description: So great a mass glides on, roaring from the deep with vast sound and breath, rolls the waves before it, and stirs up the whirlpools mightily. It rushes gliding forward, scatters and blows back the sea. Now you might think a broken cloud was rolling on, now that a lofty rock, torn off, was being swept along by winds or hurricanes, or that eddying whirlwinds were rising as the waves rush together; or that the sea was stirring up some confused heaps of earth, or that perhaps Triton with his trident overturning the cavern down below, in the billowy tide, was raising from the deep a rocky mass to heaven.