[Footnote 260: 'By Pollux he is of the mushroom sort: he hides himself with his head: he looks like an Illyrian: he is got up like one;'-- 'I should be surprised if he be not either some dreaming fellow (? al. housebreaker) or a cut purse: he takes a good look of the ground, gazes about him, takes note of the house.'--Trinum. 850-862.] [Footnote 261: Bacchid. 289.] [Footnote 262: Curculio, 337, etc.] [Footnote 263: Cp. the proverbial 'taking the breeches off a Highlander,' and the lines in one of Burns' earliest songs-- 'And then there's something in her gait Gars ony dress look weel.' ] CHAPTER VII. TERENCE AND THE COMIC POETS SUBSEQUENT TO PLAUTUS. The names of five or six comic dramatists are known, who fill the space of eighteen years between the death of Plautus and the representation of the earliest play of Terence, the 'Andria.' From one of these, Aquilius, some verses are quoted, which Varro did not hesitate to attribute to Plautus, and which Gellius characterises as 'Plautinissimi.' They are the words of a parasite, complaining of the invention of sun-dials as inconveniently retarding the dinner hour. Among these writers the most famous was Caecilius Statius, an Insubrian Gaul, first a slave, and afterwards a freedman of a member of the Caecilian house. He is mentioned by Jerome as having been a 'contubernalis' of Ennius,--a term which has been explained as meaning that they were together members of the poets' collegium or club, which met in the temple of Minerva on the Aventine. His poetic career very nearly coincides with that of the epic and tragic poet, and he is said to have died one year after him, in 168 B.C. Some Roman critics ranked him above even Plautus as a poet. The line of Horace-- Vincere Caecilius gravitate, Terentius arte-- probably indicates the ground of their preference. He is said also to have been careful in the construction of his plots[264]. Cicero, who often quotes from him, speaks of him as having written a bad style[265]. He is also mentioned among those poets who 'powerfully moved the feelings.' He composed about forty plays. Most of them had Greek titles, and a considerable number of these are identical with the titles of comedies by Menander. Two of the longest of his fragments express with more bitterness and less humour the feelings which husbands in Plautus entertain towards their wives. In one of these passages he has adapted his Greek original to the coarser Roman taste with even less fastidiousness than Plautus generally shows[266]. Another passage, from the Synephebi, is more in the spirit of Terence than of Plautus. It is one in which a young lover complains that the 'good nature' (commoditas) of his father made it impossible to cheat him with an easy conscience. Occasionally we find specimens of those short maxims which probably led the Augustan critics to attribute to him the character of _gravitas_, such as the Serit arbores quae alteri saeclo prosint,