He was much the most productive among the early tragic poets. The titles of his dramas are variously reckoned from about 37 to about 50 in number. Like Ennius, he seems to have made great use of the Trojan cycle of events; and, in his representation of character and action, to have appealed largely to the martial sympathies of the Romans. Two of his dramas, the Brutus, treating of the downfall of the Tarquinian dynasty, and the Aeneadae, or Decius, founded on the story of the second Decius, who devoted himself at the battle of Sentinum, belonged to the class of Fabulae Praetextatae. He followed the example of Ennius in composing a national epic, called Annales, in three books. He was the author also of what seem to have been works on grammar and literary criticism and history, written in trochaic and other metres, and known by the names Didascalica and Pragmatica, and Parerga. The subjects of these last works, as well as those of some of the satires of Lucilius, and of the poems of Porcius Licinus and Volcatius Sedigitus, written in trochaic and septenarian verse, show the attention which was given about this time by Roman authors to the principles of composition. The literary and grammatical studies of the time of Accius must have prepared the way for the rapid development of style which characterised the first half of the first century B.C. In some of the fragments of Accius distinctions in the meaning of words--e.g. of 'pertinacia' and 'pervicacia'--are prominently brought out. We note also in his remains, as in those of Pacuvius, a great access of formative energy in the language, especially in abstract words in _-tas_ and _-tudo_, many of which afterwards dropped out of use. The antagonism manifested by Lucilius to Accius seems in a great measure to have arisen from his claims to a kind of literary dictatorship in questions of criticism and style.