Another distinguished writer of plays was Curiatius Maternus, a well-known orator; it is in his house that Tacitus places the scene of the _Dialogus_, and he is the chief character of the conversation. He had written his first tragedy under Nero,[123] and at the time of the _Dialogus_ (A.D. 79-81) his _Cato_--a _fabula praetexta_--was the talk of Rome.[124] He had written another historical drama on the ancestor of Nero, L. Domitius Ahenobarbus, the persistent foe of Julius Caesar, who perished on the field of Pharsalia.[125] He had also written plays on the more hackneyed themes of Medea and Thyestes.[126] He had all the opportunities and all the requisite gifts for a successful public career, but his heart was with the Muses, and he resolved to quit public life and to devote himself wholly to poetry, for there, in his estimation, the truest fame was to be found.[127] Here our knowledge ends. Of the details of his life we are as ignorant as of his plays. A few other names of tragic poets are known to us. Paccius wrote an _Alcithoe_,[128] Faustus a _Thebais_ and a _Tereus_,[129] Rubrenus Lappa an _Atreus_,[130] while Scaevus Memor,[131] victor at the Agon Capitolinus and brother of Turnus the satirist, wrote a _Hercules_ and a _Hecuba_ or _Troades_.[132] Martial (xi. 9) styles him the 'glory of the Roman buskin', but he too is but the shadow of an empty name. The tragedies of the age are lost to us, all save the tragedies of the philosopher Seneca, plays of which, save for one casual reference[133] in Quintilian, contemporary literature gives no hint, but which, however little they may have deserved it, were destined to have no negligible influence on the subsequent history of the world's drama. II SENECA