The most striking departure of Roman comedy from the Greek resides in the omission of the choral interludes and the substitution of long lyrical monodies in the place of spoken and recited lines. In the Greek plays the acts were separated by choral interludes, dances, revels, and the like. With the careful costuming as well as with the frequent doubling of rôles in the Greek theater, much time was required for changes of garb. Plautus had few trained singers available for an effective chorus, few dancers, and he needed but little time between the acts, since there was no scene-shifting and masks were not used in his day. A Plautine play was almost a continuous performance, and a performance with an abundance of music. The rapid dialogue that carried the most vital action was usually spoken without musical accompaniment in six-foot iambics. This dialogue usually constituted about a third of the play. Soliloquies, monologues (except in prologues), and scenes of tense emotion were apt to be sung to the flute in a variety of meters that kept changing to suit the mood and the emotion. These parts, called _cantica_, were rare in some plays and especially in the early ones, while in others they took up as much as a third of the play. To these cantica we shall presently return. Certain scenes composed of recitative were accompanied by the flute. Such scenes we are accustomed to even now, especially in sentimental plays where love-making and moonlight are signals for the muted violins to accompany the spoken words with a soft obligato. In Plautus the meters of such scenes, usually seven- and eight-foot lines, vary considerably from the normal dialogue verse. There is only one passage in ancient comedy in which we happen to have the original Greek material re-cast into a Roman canticum. A late critic, Aulus Gellius,[11] quotes a song of Caecilius, and with it the original Greek to demonstrate what he calls the inadequacy of the Latin paraphrase. Gellius, however, misses the point. The substance of the Greek—the conventional complaints of a scold-ridden husband—was deliberately changed. The smooth narration of the original was not suited to song, and Caecilius wanted a text that would give the musician a chance to bring out effectively the constantly changing emotions of the speaker. In the Greek the husband simply informs the audience, with suitable comment, that his wife, jealous of her slave maid, has had her sold to get her out of the house. There is of course no great depth to the husband’s emotions, though the range from pity to sarcasm is well enough brought out. The Latin version stresses this variation of mood by a constant shift of meters, the verse running speedily from the tripping trochaic septenarii through cretics, bacchiacs, cretics again, and then iambics. The man comes on shouting to music that changes its rhythm with every line.