One of the greatest difficulties that the dramatists had to contend with in the old day was the securing of good actors. Not only did Livius begin without the aid of any trained actors, but for half a century at least the profession was not attractive. Livius seems to have formed his own troupe. Naevius may have depended somewhat on players from Campania who were trained in giving Atellan farces. At least that seems to be the implication of Festus in explaining the term “fabula personata,” and we know that Oscan Pompeii had a permanent theater at that time. Polybius, the Greek, found the acting in Roman tragedies very unsatisfactory. The chief difficulty was of course that the games came so rarely that in the early day no actor could possibly have made a living by the profession. For the first twenty years it is likely that at most only two tragedies and two comedies were produced a year at the annual Ludi Romani. In 220 a new festival, the Ludi plebeii, was added for November, but it is not likely that at first plays were given there. At least none are recorded till twenty years later. In 214 the plays were assigned four days of the Ludi Romani, and in 212 games, including plays, were voted in honor of Apollo. Hence we may assume that by the end of the Punic war there would be about six days a year set apart for dramatic performances, that is, about six tragedies and six comedies were played once each year. Since the aediles (and praetors, in the case of the Apollo games) selected a new play for each performance, the annual offering of plays might be considerable, and some rivalries sprang up among the poets. For instance, a Terentian prologue[15] reveals an amusing situation in which, after the aediles had paid for the play and were inspecting it, a rival dramatist gained admission to the rehearsal and suddenly started to charge Terence with plagiary. In another prologue of Terence, Ambivius, the producer, reminds his audience of how he had in his youth insisted on re-staging rejected plays of Caecilius Statius till the audience learned to like them, adding that Caecilius had suffered unjustly from the criticism of rival poets. We may then assume a considerable activity and a not unwholesome rivalry among the dramatists.