When the censor Cassius Longinus in 154 B.C. commenced the erection of a theatre on the Palatine hill near the temple of Cybele, at whose festivals plays were given, the ex-consul Scipio Nasica rose in the Senate and in a speech full of feeling warned the Romans not to countenance this foreign amusement, on the ground that it would sap the foundations of the national character. His words produced so deep an impression that the Senate not only voted to pull down the part of the building already erected, and to refuse permission for the erection of similar buildings in the future, but even prohibited altogether the renting of seats at theatrical representations; Romans who wished to see a play must remain standing during a performance, or sit on the ground. Naturally so stringent measures could not long remain in force. Nine years later Mummius, the destroyer of Corinth, presented dramas in connection with his triumph, and put up wooden seats for the spectators. The first stone theatre in Rome was built by Pompey, the rival of Caesar, in 55 B.C. In Pompeii, on the contrary, a permanent theatre had been erected at least a hundred years earlier. The Oscan culture was so completely merged in that of Rome that our knowledge of it as an independent development is extremely slight; and no information has come down to us regarding the history of the native drama. From literary sources we know only of a crude form of popular comedy in which, as in the Italian Commedia dell' arte, there were stock characters distinguished by their masks,--Maccus a buffoon, Bucco a voracious, talkative lout, Pappus an old man who is always cheated, and Dossennus a knave. The scene of these exhibitions was always Atella, the Gotham of Campania, whence they were called Atellan farces. The Theatre at Pompeii, however, is a proof that as early as the second century B.C., in at least one Campanian city, dramatic representations of a high order were given. Here, perhaps, as at Athens, they were associated with the worship of Dionysus; for the satyrs were companions of the Wine-god, and the head of a satyr, carved in tufa, still projects from the keystone of the arch at the outer end of one of the vaulted passages leading to the orchestra. Greek verse, and native verse modelled after the Greek, must have gained a hearing at Pompeii, and the works of Oscan poets--not a line of which has come down to us--must have stirred the hearts of the people long before Livius Andronicus, and Naevius, who brought inspiration from his Campanian home, produced their dramas at Rome.