Unquestionably the first dramatic poets of Rome laboured under great disadvantages. They had not only to form a drama, but to mould to a taste for the reception of it a barbarous people, whose softest and most luxurious enjoyments partook of that ferocity which rendered that race terrible in the eyes of the world, but to the philosophic mind not truly great--never, in the slightest measure, amiable or estimable. Nature, moreover, had been ransacked by the Greek poets, so that nothing but imitation was left for the Romans, who in letters, science, or arts, and particularly in the drama, attained no excellence but in proportion as they copied their Grecian predecessors. Even their copies are allowed by their own best authors to be wretched productions when compared with the works of the great originals.[D] Compared with Menander Terence was frigid and unaffecting, in sublimity even Accius was incomparably inferior to Eschylus, Pacuvius in philosophic knowledge to Euripides, and the whole body of the tragic writers of Rome, including Seneca, sink when put in competition with Sophocles. A poet of the name of Seneca wrote some tragedies--but it yet remains, and in all likelihood will ever remain, undecided whether it was Lucius Annoeus Seneca, the same who distinguished himself as a philosopher, and whose admirable moral sentiments have been given to the world in an English dress and arrangement, by Sir Roger Lestrange. There have not been wanting critics of considerable eminence to maintain that the name of Seneca was assumed in order to conceal that of the real author. Quintilian ascribes to him the tragedy of Medea. The Troas and the Hippolytus are also said to be of his composition, while the _Agamemnon_, the _Hercules Fureus_, and the _Thyestes_ and _Hercules in Oeta_, are supposed to have been written by his father _Marcus_ Annoeus Seneca, the declaimer. Be the author of them who he may, there can be but one opinion on the merit of the compositions. The style is nervous and replete with beauties, but, according to the corrupted taste of the time in which they were written, abounds too much with ornament, is often turgid and inflated. Those tragedies, however, contain much good morality, conveyed in brilliant sentences and illustrated by lofty and glowing imagery.