communicated new ideas and experience, and fostered among the mass of the Roman people the only taste for serious literature of which they were capable. They may have exercised a beneficial influence also on the thoughts and lives of men. They kept the national ideal of duty, the 'manners of the olden time,' the 'fas et antiqua castitudo' (to use an expression of Accius), before the minds of the people: they inculcated by precept and by representations great lessons of fortitude and energy: they taught the maxims of common sense, and touched the minds of their audiences with a humanity of feeling naturally alien to them. No teaching on the stage could permanently preserve the old Roman virtue, simplicity, and loyalty to the Republic, against the corrupting and disorganising effects of constant wars and conquests, and of the gross forms of luxury, that suited the temperament of Rome: but, among the various influences acting on the mind of the people, none probably was of more unmixed good than that of the tragic drama of Ennius, Pacuvius, and Accius. [Footnote 1: E.g. the _Dulorestes_ of Pacuvius.] [Footnote 2: De Re Rustica, Lib. ii. Praef. Quoted also by Columella, Praef. 15.] [Footnote 3: De Amicitia, 7.] [Footnote 4: Cic. Pro P. Sestio, 65.] [Footnote 5: Chap. 57.] [Footnote 6: Cicero, Brutus, 48, 45; De Orat. iii. 8. 30: 'Quid noster hic Caesar nonne novam quandam rationem attulit orationis et dicendi genus induxit prope singulare? Quis unquam res praeter hunc tragicas paene comice, tristes remisse, severas hilare, forenses scaenica prope venustate tractavit atque ita, ut neque iocus magnitudine rerum excluderetur nec gravitas facetiis minueretur.'] [Footnote 7: Cf. Cic. De Orat. iii. 7: 'Atque id primum in poetis cerni licet quibus est proxima cognatio cum oratoribus quam sint inter sese Ennius, Pacuvius, Acciusque dissimiles.'] [Footnote 8: 'Sanctitas certe, et, ut sic dicam, virilitas, ab iis petenda est, quando nos in omnia deliciarum vitia dicendi quoque ratione defluximus.'--Quintil. Inst. Or. i. 8. 9.] [Footnote 9: Inst. Or. x. i. 97.] [Footnote 10: Cf. Cic. Opt. Gen. Orat.: 'Itaque licet dicere et Ennium summum epicum poetam si cui ita videtur, et Pacuvium tragicum, et Caecilium fortasse comicum.'] [Footnote 11: Pliny, Hist. Nat. xxxv. 7.] [Footnote 12: xiii. 2.] [Footnote 13: 'Young man, though thou art in haste, this stone entreats thee to regard it, and then read what is written:--Here are laid the bones of the poet Marcus Pacuvius. This I desired to be not unknown to thee. Farewell.'] [Footnote 14: Brutus, 74.] [Footnote 15: The writer of the treatise on Rhetoric addressed to C. Herennius.]