Attius was born B.C. 170, and became somewhat distinguished while his senior and master, Pacuvius, was yet alive. They met on friendly terms to discuss the young rival's tragedy of "Atreus." Pacuvius commended its good points, but declared it to be somewhat harsh and hard. "You are right," replied Attius, "but I hope to improve. Fruits which are at first hard and sour, become soft and mellow, but those which begin by being soft, end in being rotten." Another fact equally significant of his conscious dignity is given by Valerius Maximus, who relates that in the assemblies of the poets, he refused to rise at the entrance of Julius Cæsar, because he felt that in the republic of letters he was his superior. The statement is plausible, as the great hero was then in his youth. The political state of the people was now rapidly growing worse, and real tragedies were being so violently acted that there was little room in the popular heart for fictitious woes. The sanguinary influence of the amphitheatre seemed to have brutalized the entire nation, the vast area of which was one theatre of dreadful tragic scenes. Amidst these, the voice of the dramatic muse was hushed. Native authors then had no literary quarries of their own to work into original shapes, but they could build up splendid edifices with materials derived from polished and prolific Greece. The existence of tragedy was not long at Rome; the dramatic spirit, as a mental excellence, never belonged to that people, and with Attius, even its form disappeared. The history of literature among the Romans is without a parallel. So prosaic and practical were the people, that they remained five centuries without an eminent poet. Even when the dazzling glories of the Grecian muse fell upon them it was only the art of imitation that they cultivated. True inspiration was foreign to their cast of mind. The most original of their writers entertained no higher idea of originality than to make it consist in the importation of a new form from Greece; and, on the ground of his own practice, affected to despise those who copied for the second or third time. Indeed, the word imitation was applied only to Latin authors, it being understood that borrowing from the Greeks, or conforming to them, implied their chief excellence. Unkindled by the Grecian torch, Roman intellect was inert; and unillumined by its formative power, their productions were both uncouth and void of enduring worth.