The Latin Muses were, indeed, then in the full pride and hope of a vigorous and daring youth. The greater part of Naevius' plays, both in tragedy and comedy, were, it is true, translated or adapted from Greek originals; but alongside of these,--the _Danae_, the _Iphigenia_, the _Andromache_, which even his masculine genius can hardly have made more than pale reflexes of Euripides--were new creations, "plays of the purple stripe," as they came to be called, where he wakened a tragic note from the legendary or actual history of the Roman race. His _Alimonium Romuli et Remi_, though it may have borrowed much from the kindred Greek legends of Danae or Melanippe, was one of the foundation-stones of a new national literature; in the tragedy of _Clastidium_, the scene was laid in his own days, and the action turned on an incident at once of national importance and of romantic personal heroism--a great victory won over the Gallic tribes of Northern Italy, and the death of the Gallic chief in single combat at the hand of the Roman consul. In his advanced years, Naevius took a step of even greater consequence. Turning from tragedy to epic, he did not now, like Andronicus, translate from the Greek, but launched out on the new venture of a Roman epic. The Latin language was not yet ductile enough to catch the cadences of the noble Greek hexameter; and the native Latin Saturnian was the only possible alternative. How far he was successful in giving modulation or harmony to this rather cumbrous and monotonous verse, the few extant fragments of the _Bellum Punicum_ hardly enable us to determine; it is certain that it met with a great and continued success, and that, even in Horace's time, it was universally read. The subject was not unhappily chosen: the long struggle between Rome and Carthage had, in the great issues involved, as well as in its abounding dramatic incidents and thrilling fluctuations of fortune, many elements of the heroic, and almost of the superhuman; and in his interweaving of this great pageant of history with the ancient legends of both cities, and his connecting it, through the story of Aeneas, with the war of Troy itself, Naevius showed a constructive power of a very high order. It is, doubtless, possible to make too much of the sweeping statements made in the comments of Macrobius and Servius on the earlier parts of the _Aeneid_--"this passage is all taken from Naevius;" "all this passage is simply conveyed from Naevius' _Punic War_." Yet there is no doubt that Virgil owed him immense obligations; though in the details of the war itself we can recognise little in the fragments beyond the dry and disconnected narrative of the rhyming chronicler. Naevius laid the foundation of the Roman epic; he left it at his death--in spite of the despondent and perhaps jealous criticism which he left as his epitaph--in the hands of an abler and more illustrious successor.