Andronicus had a rough theatre assigned him on the Aventine Mount. In accordance with the fashion of his day, he played entire parts without assistance, until an injury to his voice obliged him to delegate the recitative passages to a boy, who sung them to the accompaniment of the flute, while he made the appropriate gestures. Thus originated a custom which thereafter prevailed at Rome,—that of having two actors, one to declaim and the other to gesticulate. Livius Andronicus kindled the first spark of literary ambition in Rome, and paved the way for her future progress in letters. He enjoyed the respect of his contemporaries, and was honored by succeeding generations, though Cicero pronounced his plays unworthy of a second reading. If we except a few doubtful lines, posterity knows his dramas only by their titles. =Cneius Nævius= (269-204 B.C.), a Campanian by birth, after serving in the First Punic War, took up his residence at Rome and there made dramatic literature his profession. His first play was represented about 235 B.C. The Greek dramatists furnished Nævius with the material for his tragedies and comedies, in the latter of which—better adapted to his genius, and therefore more original—he particularly excelled. Closing his eyes to the danger of satirizing the patrician houses, he fearlessly revived the personal attack of Aristophanes in his ridicule of Scipio and the Metelli. His lampoons directed against the latter cost him dear. The verse of the poet,—“It is fate, not merit, that has made the Metelli always consuls of Rome,”—stung them to the quick, and they procured his imprisonment. Nævius employed the time in writing comedies; and after his liberation, nowise daunted by his previous bad fortune, he let fly his shafts at the nobility as recklessly as ever. Rome could no longer tolerate him, and sent him forth from her gates to die in exile. The fate of Nævius proved a warning to future comic poets. None were ambitious to assume the role which he had played; but, taking Menander for their model rather than Aristophanes, they sought their subjects in the follies and foibles of society at large. So far as we can judge from the scanty fragments that remain, the style of Nævius, though unpolished (for he still wrote in the old Saturnian verse), was nervous, bold, and pointed. His works were for centuries the delight of the Romans, who admired his independence; while succeeding authors did not regard it unworthy of their genius to borrow the spirited thoughts of Rome’s first native poet. His epitaph read as follows:— “If gods might to a mortal pay the tribute of a tear, The Muses would shed one upon the poet Nævius’ bier; For when he was transferred unto the regions of the tomb, The people soon forgot to speak the native tongue of Rome.” Sellar thus puts in English the old Roman’s description of a flirt, which survives from one of his comedies:—