Of a primitive drama we have a vigorous tradition. Simple comic farces were in existence in the village festivals both north and south of Rome—and likely enough at Rome too, though the city preferred to forget its primitive amusements as it grew into a metropolis. Unfortunately the tradition regarding the early Latin drama was vitiated by some early quasi-scholar—apparently Accius—who mingled futile hearsay with a line or two of an early record about Etruscan dancers and with the Aristotelian theory of how Greek drama grew up.[2] He mis-called this putative drama by the name _satura_. His story unfortunately became orthodox and displaced what might otherwise have survived of a truer tradition. The story is attributed to the year 364 B.C., a time at which no historical records were kept except for the dates and occasions of official priestly sacrifices. That is to say, the story is not worth repeating because it is attributed to a date when no records were kept of such events. All we know is that towns not far from Rome—and therefore presumably Rome as well—had simple drama before Livius began to translate Greek plays. Such were the germs of the lyric, epic, and drama, vital and capable of growth when and if the times should be favorable. But what is a favorable time? Why, for instance, had not literature come to life among others of the countless tribes about the Mediterranean except the Greeks and Hebrews? I ask, not to answer, but to emphasize the riddle. At Rome a few individuals were emerging from the group, the group was itself breaking out of its boundaries, but experiences were still modest. The citizens were chiefly quiet hard-working farmers who owned and tilled their plots; there was no seafaring commerce that brought tales of adventure from foreign lands, no colonizing beyond the seas, no traveling to foreign parts to bring the Latins a sense of awareness of their own place in the world. Society, as in any democracy where customs of the ruling clique are accepted by the rest, was passing through no strenuous changes, and no religious teacher from beyond the border was entering to shake tradition.