The task undertaken by Naevius and Plautus was indeed a much easier one than that accomplished by the early writers of tragedy. They were not called upon to create a new taste, or to gratify a taste recently acquired in Sicily and the towns of Magna Graecia. They had only to give ampler and more defined form, fuller and more coherent substance, to a kind of entertainment which was indigenous in Italy. The improvised 'Saturae'--'dramatic medleys or farces with musical accompaniment'--had been represented on Roman holidays for more than a century before the first performance of a regular play by Livius Andronicus. And these 'Saturae' had been themselves developed partly out of the older Fescennine dialogues--the rustic raillery of the vintage and the harvest-home,--partly out of mimetic dances imported from Etruria. Another kind of dramatic entertainment, the 'Oscum ludicrum,' which was developed into the literary form of the 'fabulae Atellanae,' with its standing characters of Maccus, Pappus, Bucco, and Dossennus, had been transferred to the city from the provinces of southern Italy, and ultimately became so popular as to be performed, not by professional actors, but by the free-born youth of Rome. The extant comedies of Plautus show considerable traces of both of these kinds of entertainment, both in the large place assigned to the 'Cantica,' which were accompanied by music and gesticulation[177], and in the farcical exaggeration of some of his characters, which provoked the criticism of Horace,-- Quantus sit Dossennus edacibus in parasitis. The mass of Roman citizens, both rural and urban, was thus prepared by their festive traditions and habits to welcome the introduction of comedy, just as they were prepared by their political traditions and aptitudes to welcome the appearance of a popular orator.