(— ◡ ) Always scolding, nagging, dinning she compelled me to obey: (— ◡ —) Innocence goes for naught: the maid is sold. (◡ — —) Now gloating and boasting my good wife appears: (— ◡ —) Tell me pray, what am I? Who is master here? The point made by the ancient critic that Caecilius did not adequately reproduce the original quality is wholly beside the point. He was not attempting to. He was making a plausible libretto for a brief song and dance in which melody, pitch, tempo, and gesture should aid in the expression of his varying moods. Menander indeed had written a readable play—he always did, and paid the penalty by seldom taking the prize. But Caecilius produced a musical comedy which, it is safe to wager, kept the audience physically responsive. It has been usual to suppose that Plautus invented the musical comedy of this type.[12] I have already referred to Naevius’ introduction of the canticum into tragedy. It had the same function in comedy and I need only repeat that Naevius served in Sicily as a soldier in the First Punic War, and that in many of the Greek towns of Sicily where the Roman soldiers were billeted, or at least resorted on furloughs, Greek tragedies and comedies were being produced in the theaters, probably with reduced choruses.[13] That is where Naevius may have found his model of the canticum. It should also be remembered that a great variety of what may be called music-hall singing and dancing went on in such places at that time. If the Roman soldiers grew fond of such performances, it would not be surprising if Naevius tried to supply in his comedies as well as in his tragedies some substitute for what Rome did not have. Audiences may make insistent demands: even Wagner was compelled to insert ballets in his operas in order to satisfy the demands of his Parisian audiences. The fragments from Naevius’ comedies are few, and in them there are none of the purely lyrical meters so often found in Plautus—the cretics, the bacchiacs, and the glyconics. But there is a large proportion of trochaic septenarii, lines which are now assumed to belong to a native Latin song meter.[14] Our evidence is slight as yet but it is perhaps sufficient to support a suggestion that musical comedy may have grown up at Rome through the gradual adaptation of Sicilian forms of entertainment by Naevius and a constant improvement upon these innovations by Plautus. We have also seen that song and chant were a decided aid in the attempt to accommodate new meters to the Roman ear.