A great many of the plays of Cæcilius were taken from Menander; and Aulus Gellius informs us that they seemed agreeable and pleasing enough, till, being compared with their Greek models, they appeared quite tame and disgusting, and the wit of the original, which they were unable to imitate, totally vanished(289). He accordingly contrasts a scene in the _Plocius_ (or Necklace,) of Cæcilius, with the corresponding scene in Menander, and pronounces them to be as different in brightness and value as the arms of Diomed and Glaucus. The scenes compared are those where an old husband complains that his wife, who was rich and ugly, had obliged him to sell a handsome female slave, of whom she was jealous. This chapter of Aulus Gellius is very curious, as it gives us a more perfect notion than we obtain from any other writer, of the mode in which the Latin comic poets copied the Greeks. To judge from this single comparison, it appears that though the Roman dramatists imitated the incidents, and caught the ideas of their great masters, their productions were not entirely translations or slavish versions: A different turn is frequently given to a thought—the sentiments are often differently expressed, and sometimes much is curtailed, or altogether omitted. AFRANIUS, though he chose Roman subjects, whence his comedies were called _Togatæ_, was an imitator of the manner of Menander— “Dicitur Afranî toga convenisse Menandro.” Indeed he himself admits, in his _Compitales_, that he derived many even of his plots from Menander and other Greek writers— “Fateor, sumpsi non a Menandro modo, Sed ut quisque habuit, quod conveniret mihi; Quod me non posse melius facere credidi.” Cicero(290) calls Afranius an ingenious and eloquent writer. Ausonius, in one of his epigrams, talks “_facundi Afrani_.” He is also praised by Quintilian, who censures him, however, for the flagitious amours which he represented on the stage(291), on account of which, perhaps, his writings were condemned to the flames by Pope Gregory I. The titles of forty-six of his plays have been collected by Fabricius, and a few fragments have been edited by Stephens. One of these, in the play entitled _Sella_, where it is said that wisdom is the child of experience and memory, has been commended by Aulus Gellius, and is plausibly conjectured(292) to have been introduced in a prologue spoken in the person of Wisdom herself— “Usus me genuit, mater peperit Memoria: Sophiam vocant me Graii; vos Sapientiam.” The following lines from the _Vopiscum_ have also been frequently quoted: “Si possent homines delinimentis capi, Omnes haberent nunc amatores anus. Ætas, et corpus tenerum, et morigeratio, Hæc sunt venena formosarum mulierum(293).” LUSCIUS LAVINIUS, also a follower of Menander, was the contemporary and enemy of Terence, who, in his prologues, has satirized his injudicious translations from the Greek—