The strong appreciation which, notwithstanding its initial defects, tragedy did meet with and retain for many generations, is a striking testimony to the worth and talent of the men who introduced it. Their position as elevators of the popular taste was not the less real because they themselves were men of provincial birth, and only partially polished minds. Both in the selection of their models and in the freedom of treating them they showed that good sense which was characteristic of the nation. As a rule, instead of trying to familiarise the people with Aeschylus and Sophocles, poets who are essentially Athenian, they generally chose the freethinking and cosmopolitan Euripides, who was easily intelligible, and whose beauties did not seem so entirely to defy imitation. What Euripides was to Greek tragedy Menander was to comedy. Both denationalised their respective fields of poetry; both thereby acquired a vast ascendancy over the Roman mind, ready as it was to be taught, and only awaiting a teacher whose views it could understand. Now although Livius actually introduced, and Naevius continued, the translation of tragedies from the Greek, it was Ennius who first rendered them with a definitely conceived purpose. This purpose was--to raise the aesthetic sense of his countrymen, to set before them examples of heroic virtue, and, above all, to enlighten their minds with what he considered rational views on subjects of morals and and religion; though, after all, the fatal facility with which the sceptical theories of Euripides were disseminated and embraced was hardly atoned for by the gain to culture which undoubtedly resulted from the tragedian's labours. Mommsen says with truth that the stage is in its essence anti-Roman, just as culture itself is anti-Roman; the one because it consumes time and interest on things that interfere with the serious business of life, the other because it creates degrees of intellectual position where the constitution intended that all should be alike. But amid the vast change that came over the Roman habits of thought, which men like Cato saw, resisted, and bewailed, it mattered little whether old traditions were violated. The stage at once became a powerful engine of popular education; and it rested with the poet to decide whether it should elevate or degrade. Political interests, it is true, were carefully guarded. The police system, with which senatorial narrowness environed the stage as it did all corporations or voluntary societies, rigidly repressed and made penal anything like liberty of speech. But it was none the less possible to inculcate the stern Roman virtues beneath the mask of an Ajax or Ulysses; and Sellar has brought out with singular clearness in his work on the poets of the Republic the national features which are stamped on this early tragedy, making it in spite of its imperfections worthy of the great Republic.