[19] Cic., _De Rep._ iv 10; Livy VII, 2, is full of anachronisms. Cf. Warnecke, _Neue Jahrb._ 1914, 94. However, Warnecke fails to note how late the evidence is and how completely it disagrees with the known circumstances of the early Roman drama. Plautus, _Cist._ 785, which promises a flogging to the incapable actor, is of course one of the jokes of the play. The ninth article of the recently discovered charter of Cyrene excuses from certain public service various people (including doctors and teachers of music) who are engaged in professions of public welfare. Since the actors’ guild at Rome was based upon Alexandrian models, it is not unlikely that certain Ptolemaic regulations were also taken over. CHAPTER IV TERENCE AND HIS SUCCESSORS Plautus lived in the most productive period of Roman comedy. He happens to mention only one rival, the aged Naevius, but from later sources we learn of Caecilius, Licinius, Trabea, Atilius, Titinius, and others who apparently began to write before the death of Plautus. That all of these actually staged plays we may be sure, since manuscripts had no chance of surviving unless they came into the official archives by way of purchase for production. So numerous were the old manuscripts in these archives that Plautus, who could at most not have written more than thirty or forty plays, was later credited with a hundred and thirty. Apparently unsigned plays were attributed to him because of the commercial value of his name. But the fact that so many stray plays were in existence is significant of the activity of writers. It is not surprising therefore that a guild of “writers and actors” flourished in the days of Plautus, and that the state recognized it and assigned it quarters on the Aventine. Of the earlier men from whose works we have fragments, only two are in any way individualized in the scant remains. Titinius, who seems to have been a late rival of Plautus, was so thoroughly lost to his successors that Cicero seems not to have been aware of him. But Varro refers to Titinius in high terms in his work on the Latin language, written while he was gathering books for Caesar’s projected public library. Varro probably was the man who ferreted out his plays and name from the aediles’ archives. It is signal praise that Varro gives Titinius when he places him by the side of Terence as a delineator of character. An allusion to one of his plays by Horace seems to indicate that some of his work was actually staged in the early Empire (more than a hundred years after the dramatist’s death) for the poet refers to a scene that is visualized rather than to a line read, and he assumes that Augustus will recognize his allusion.[1]