It would, however, be misleading to stress these facts, which are more patent in public, social, and religious activity than in art. During the republic at least the literature is experimental, and it reveals many diverse tendencies, some of which did not survive in the Augustan day. While tragedy sought to continue the traditions of the best classical Greek work, it chose as its model the Euripidean tragedy with its more modern humanism rather than the older drama whose problems seemed to them archaic. Responding also to the social ideals of a more normal domestic life than old Greece possessed, Roman tragedy was somewhat more romantic in theme, and it broke up the Greek form in order to admit a larger space for the newer music. Comedy on the other hand neglected the Aristophanic type completely, building upon the social plays of Menander and his contemporaries. Rome took patriotism too seriously to care to have policies of state and august consuls ridiculed upon the stage. Yet the delicate art of Menander was not the goal of writers like Naevius and Plautus. His scrupulous respect for words, his fastidious striving toward a quiet contemplative expression of emotion, his insistence upon form, that directed its art toward the reader long after the first performance was forgotten, had made him more genuinely classic in effect than Aristophanes. The Roman dramatist wrote for a single performance, where effects must be translucent and immediate to an audience that was used to the robust fun of homemade plays. Plautus has no connections with rigorously classical ideals. He cares for spontaneous, natural, paganly human laughter. The Roman lyric of the Republic also rejects classification. Before the Greek lyric reached Rome the great singers of Greece had already been forgotten by decadent Athens as thoroughly as seventeenth-century England had forgotten Chaucer. When the Romans began to study lyrical forms they apparently did not even hear the names of Sappho and Alcaeus; they were told about the dainty epigrams of Alexandria, and they began to copy these. Aedituus and Laevius might as well have lived at Samos. Catullus at first fed on the same fare, but one stirring experience set him free. Thereafter he wrote songs that no Greek could have claimed. They have the lilt, beauty, and precision of his models, but a natural freedom, a lucidity, and a convincing passion that make the epigrams of the Garland seem lucubratory. They obviously spring out of a society that is less artificial and out of a life that grows in a young world.