As we have said, the Romans, like all the peoples who followed the Greeks, had to take cognizance of what had been done before. Livius and Naevius were the first to adapt Greek comedies for the Roman stage, as they had been the first to adapt Greek tragedies. Of their work, however, we have again only fragments, saved usually by late grammarians to illustrate archaic grammar. Of Naevius we know the titles of thirty-four comedies, an average of one a year during his period of activity—but since many of these have come to us by the merest coincidence we should not assume that we know all the names of his comedies by any means. Most of these thirty-four plays were adapted from the Greek, but not all. The man who wrote the first Roman epic and the first Roman chronicle play (praetexta) was probably never a slavish copyist. We have noticed how he came to grief for his daring in attacking the powerful Metelli during a critical period of the war. Such criticism would presumably appear in Roman plays. The fragments of his comedies also show many local references that are best explained as coming from plays purely Roman, and such titles as _Hariolus_, _Tunicularia_, and _Agitatoria_ suggest independent work. However, so long as we have only about a hundred complete lines rescued from all the plays we can hardly speak with certainty on this point. In discussing tragedy we suggested that Livius and Naevius were probably the men who shaped the “operatic” form of Roman tragedy, and it is likely that they too were the men who carried this form into comedy, though its final development seems to be due to Plautus. The distinctly lyric lines are rare, to be sure, but the fragments are too few to permit us to expect many. The majority are iambic, the Roman equivalent of the Greek originals, and they have of course the free Latin form. One line is anapaestic; the old Roman trochaic septenarius, well suited to song, is frequent and so is the iambic octonarius, which Naevius seems to treat like a septenarius with anacrusis. Indeed Cicero[1] calls it a septenarius and indicates that it was sung to the accompaniment of the flute. These were the comedies which entertained the Romans at their festivals during the gloomy years of the Punic war, those years that are so vividly pictured for us by Livy. If we could recover these plays and interpolate them between the harrowing scenes of Livy’s history we should know more than we do of Roman society during that most critical epoch of the nation’s history.