[11] Milne, _Cat. of lit. pap. in British Mus._ 1927 (no. 52); cf. Wuest and Croenert, _Philol._ 1928, 153 ff. [12] See Marx’s ed. of _Rudens_, 254 ff. [13] Crusius, _Die Responsion in den plaut. Cantica_ (1929). [14] See Bieber, _Denkmäler d. Theaterwesen_ and Bulle, _Abh. Bayer. Akad._ 1928. [15] If Horace’s strictures on the new music of the drama in the _Ars Poet._ 200-15 took a hint from Neoptolemus, we may suppose that Hellenistic critics had objected to this change. [16] Robert Bridges, _Ibant Obscuri_. Such hexameters as They were amid the shadows by night in loneliness obscure Walking forth i’ the void and vasty dominyon of Ades: As by an uncertain moonray secretly illumin’d— do not represent what happened to Latin in Ennius, for the reason that in Latin pronunciation the quantity was the dominant element controlling even the accent. In English the reverse is true. Fraenkel, _Iktus und Akzent_, has recently committed a similar mistake in judgment, influenced apparently by the high respect that speakers of German must necessarily have for stress. He has resorted to daring hypotheses in trying to prove that Plautus always correctly observes a species of stress (see Sonnenschein in _Class. Quart._, 1929, 81). It is significant that the French, who feel little stress in their diction, go to the other extreme and find stress insignificant in Latin. Latin in fact was like neither; it resembled Hungarian in being primarily quantitative, and in its word accent had a moderate stress not without a rather noticeable pitch such as is found in some parts of Sweden. [17] See Lindsay, _Early Latin Verse_, Leo, _Geschichte Lat. Lit._, p. 68. Fraenkel, _Iktus und Akzent_, seems to me only to have confused the results that have been summarized with consummate skill and good sense by Lindsay. [18] In chap. I. CHAPTER III GREEK COMEDY ON THE ROMAN STAGE The theme of Roman _gravitas_ has perhaps been overworked. The impression seems to be current that Roman schoolboys cheered at the ball games in periodic sentences, and that Roman babes begged for the moon in quantitative hexameters. It appears to be difficult to imagine that the Romans took a very special pleasure in rollicking comedy. Only twenty-six of their comedies have survived, but it is safe to say that if we now had all the respectable literature of the period before 100 B.C., including the epics, the tragedies, the minor verse, and even the artistic prose, the shelves that held the comedies would easily outnumber all the rest. Of what other nation is that true? We have the titles of over four hundred of these plays for the Republican period and there is no reason to suppose that we have even an approach to the full list.