There is a good deal of wit and archness in the two concluding lines, and the whole breathes a spirit of free-thinking, such as one might expect from the translator of Euhemerus. In another passage, indeed, but which, I presume, was attributed to an impious character, or one writhing under the stroke of recent calamity, it is roundly declared that the gods take no concern in human affairs, for if they did, the good would prosper, and the wicked suffer, whereas it is quite the contrary: “Ego Deûm genus esse semper dixi, et dicam cœlitum; Sed eos non curare opinor, quid agat humanum genus; Nam si curent, bene bonis sit, male malis; quod nunc abest(177).” _Telephus_ is probably taken from a lost play of Euripides, ridiculed by Aristophanes in his _Acharnenses_, from a scene of which it would seem that Telephus had appeared on the stage in tattered garments. The passages of the Latin play which remain, exhibit Telephus as an exile from his kingdom, wandering about in ragged habiliments. The lines of Horace, in his Art of Poetry, (a work which is devoted to the subject of the Roman drama,) are probably in allusion to this tragedy: “Telephus et Peleus, cum pauper et exsul, uterque Projicit ampullas et sesquipedalia verba.” _Thyestes_.—The loose and familiar numbers in which the tragedy of Telephus was written, were by no means suitable to the atrocious subject of the Supper of Thyestes. Ennius accordingly has been censured by Cicero, in a passage of his _Orator_, for employing them in this drama.—“Similia sunt quædam apud nostros; velut illa in Thyeste, ‘Quemnam te esse dicam! qui tarda in senectute,’ Et quæ sequuntur: quæ, nisi cum tibicen accesserit, orationi sunt solutæ simillima.” There can therefore be little doubt that the passage in Horace’s Art of Poetry, in which a tragedy on the subject of Thyestes is blamed as flat and prosaic, and hardly rising above the level of ordinary conversation in comedy, alluded to the work of Ennius— “Indignatur item privatis, ac prope socco Dignis carminibus, narrari cœna Thyestæ.” Yet this spiritless tragedy, was very popular in Rome, and continued to be frequently represented, till Varius treated the same subject in a manner, as we are informed by Quintilian, equal to the Greeks(178).