But even if the Sicilian performances offered suggestions of how to stage comedies and tragedies without choruses it seems to have been the Romans who made the old classics conform to the new method and in doing so greatly enlarged rather than diminished the scope of the musical accompaniment. The second reason for this increase in songs seems to me, therefore, to lie in the need for music to help carry the new meters which dramatic writing demanded. Latin had been as poor in meters as early English was later. The chief drudge of all work had been the Saturnian verse, a form unfit for either sustained narrative or for realistic dialogue. Its line was slow and reflective. It had been used for ritual song, for funeral elegy, for lullabies, for gnomic poetry, and apparently also for lampoons; but it was as unfit for the drama as Ennius had found it to be for epic narration. There was also apparently a lively marching verse, the quadratus, the meter with which we are familiar from the trochaic tetrameters of the Greeks and from the lines of Tennyson’s _Locksley Hall_: With the standards of the peoples plunging through the thunder storm. At least critics are now ready to accept the remark of Horace that lines like Rex erit qui recte faciet, qui non faciet, non erit, were sung in the days of old Camillus. Whenever we happen to have a fragment of a soldier’s song quoted in Latin it is in this quick step: Ecce Caesar nunc triumphat, qui subegit Gallias. That meter had possibilities in the drama, and it was very freely used, though it doubtless had to be weaned away from its boisterous military associations. For rapid action and excitement it served well. It appears that early tragedy felt that it belonged to music and used it in lyric passages, in recitative chants as well as in dramatic speeches. Naevius was very fond of it.