Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/250

 language, which made his comedies even more influential as works to be read than as plays to be acted, his prologues dealing critically with the form or spirit of the drama, the absence of burlesque in his characters, and even the very names of his dramatis personæ, show that we have left the popular spectacle and entered the refined theatre of an educated class.

§ 60. But in these thoroughly Greek associations of the Terentian stage we may close our brief review of the progress of dramatic art in Rome. Terence, the slave from Carthage, drawing exact pictures of Greek life in the language of Rome for the edification of an audience which thinks Greek, transforms the drama into as curious a literary exotic as can be easily conceived. If such was the end of Rome's rude native comedy, in tragedy the Romans were from the first dependent on the Greeks. Without common mythology, without bonds of common religion, the divided city of plebeian and patrician could feel none of the public sentiments out of which tragedy arose at Athens. If a tragedy based