_Pyrrha the Weaver_, _The Dancing Girl of Ferentinum_, _The Flute-player_ and _The Girl of Ulubrae_. These heroines are folk in humble life but the fragments show that they are none the less sprightly, quick-witted and interesting creatures. Today we are sadly at a loss in trying to comprehend the life of the great masses of the people during the Plautine period. Plautus in his re-shapings of Greek plots reflects it only in his suppressions and intimations, and then very imperfectly. Livy in his dignified and voluminous history of this period strides majestically over it. We would gladly surrender much of both for the faithful and sympathetic picture that a volume of Titinius could give us. If Varro’s judgment was right in lauding the power of characterization of this author we might, if he were rescued, find him a place by the side of very modern realists. Caecilius Statius is the other writer of comedy vying with Plautus of whom something is known, and he too deserves to be remembered with a keen hope that his works may some day come to light. He was more orthodox than Titinius, kept, like Plautus, more or less close to his Greek models, and obeyed the same social purpose of not offending puritanic taste by dressing his players in Greek garb. Strange to say, he was a Celt, the first in the history of literature. He had apparently been captured as a boy somewhere near Milan when the Romans were campaigning there during the Hannibalic war. That he was not a mere child at the time becomes evident from the fact that he never wrote Latin quite well enough to suit the discriminating ear of Cicero—who otherwise read him with pleasure. Yet he somehow received a good education—as bright slaves often did—for he knew Greek well. He also got his freedom somehow and became a close associate of Ennius. He lived long enough to give aid to Terence in the production of that young man’s first youthful play, the _Andria_, and was generous enough to recommend the play to the aediles when they hesitated to accept it. Ambivius, the loyal producer of Terence, remarks in one of the prologues which he spoke for Terence that Caecilius had had a discouraging series of rejections in his youth but that he, Ambivius, confident of the poet’s worth, had persisted in presenting the plays till success was assured.[2] A later critic, Volcacius—who, to be sure, takes no account of the togatae in this particular list—places Caecilius at the very head of the writers of comedy, giving Plautus second place and Terence sixth. Unfortunately we do not happen to know whether this critic was a man of sound judgment.