[Footnote 170: 'That rock makes the passage narrow, and from beneath that rock a spring gushing out sweeps past the river's bank.'] [Footnote 171: Inst. Or. x. i. 99.] CHAPTER VI. ROMAN COMEDY. PLAUTUS. ABOUT 254 TO 184 B.C. The era in which Roman epic and tragic poetry arose was also the flourishing era of Roman comedy. A later generation looked back on the age of Ennius and Plautus as an age of great poets, who had passed away:-- Ea tempestate flos poetarum fuit Qui nunc abierunt hinc in communem locum.[172] And among these poets the writers of comedy were both most numerous and apparently the most popular in their own time[173]. Besides the names of Naevius, Plautus, Caecilius, and Terence, we know the names of other comic poets of less fame[174], and from allusions in the extant plays of Plautus[175] and in the prologues of Terence we infer that there were other competitors for public favour whose names were unknown to a later generation. In the Ciceronian age the works of these forgotten playwrights were for the most part attributed to Plautus, probably with the view of gaining some temporary popularity for them. In the time of Gellius no fewer than 130 plays passed under his name; among these, twenty-one were regarded as undoubtedly his, nineteen more as probably genuine, and the rest as spurious. They were however all of the class of _palliatae_; and as the _fabulae togatae_ seem, after the time of Terence, to have been composed in much greater number than those founded on Greek originals, most of them must have belonged to the first half of the second century B.C. Plays of a later date would have clearly shown by their diction that they were not the work of Plautus.