the theatre was merely a place for secular amusement, and poetry only an exercise of the fancy. Again, the religion of the Romans was not ideal, like that of the Greeks. The old national faith of Italy, not being rooted in the heart, soon became obsolete, and readily admitted the ingrafting of foreign superstitions, which had no hold on the belief or love of the people. Nor was the genius of the Roman people such as to sympathize with the legends of the past; they lived only in the present and the future; they did not look back on their national heroes as demigods; they were pressing forward to extend the frontiers of their empire, to bring under their yoke nations which their forefathers had not known. If they regarded their ancestors at all, it was not in the light of men of heroic stature as compared with themselves, but as those whom they could equal or even surpass. The scenes of real life, the bloody combats of the gladiators, the captives, and malefactors stretched on crosses, expiring in excruciating agonies or mangled by wild beasts, were the tragedies which most deeply interested a Roman audience. The Romans were a rough people, full of physical rather than of intellectual energy, courting peril and setting no value on human life or suffering. Their very virtues were stern and severe; they were strangers to both the passions which it was the object of tragedy to excite--pity and terror. In the public games of Greece, the refinements of poetry mingled with those exercises which were calculated to invigorate the physical powers, and develop manly beauty. Those of Rome were sanguinary and brutalizing, the amusements of a nation to whom war was a pleasure and a pastime. It cannot be asserted, however, that tragedy was never to a certain extent an acceptable entertainment at Rome, but only that it never flourished there as it did at Athens, and that no Roman tragedies can be compared with those of Greece. 6. TRAGIC POETS.--Three separate eras produced tragic poets. In the first flourished Livius Andronicus, Naevius, and Ennius; in the second, Pacuvius and Attius; in the third, Asinius Pollio wrote tragedies, the plots of which seem to have been taken from Roman history. Ovid attempted a "Medea," and even the Emperor Augustus, with other men of genius, tried his hand, though unsuccessfully, at tragedy.