Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/494

474 in the Roman hostelries. Songs of this sort accordingly early came upon the public stage, and certainly formed the first nucleus of the Roman theatre. But not only were these beginnings of the drama in Rome, as well as elsewhere, modest and humble; they were, in a remarkable manner, accounted from the very first disreputable. The Twelve Tables already denounced malicious and vain song-singing, imposing severe penalties not only upon incantations but even on lampoons composed against a fellow-citizen or recited before his door, and forbidding the employment of wailing-women at funerals. But far more severely than by such legal restrictions, the incipient exercise of art was affected by the moral anathema, which was denounced against these frivolous and mercenary trades by the staid earnestness of the Roman character. "The trade of a poet," says Cato, "in former times was not respected; if any one occupied himself therewith or addicted himself to banquets, he was called an idler." Whoever practised dancing, music, or ballad-singing for money, was visited with a double stigma, in consequence of the more and more confirmed disapproval of the acquisition of a livelihood by services rendered for hire. While accordingly a participation in the masked farces with stereotyped characters, that formed the usual native amusement (P. 234), was looked upon as a pardonable youthful frolic, the appearing on a public stage for money and without a mask was considered as directly infamous, and the singer and poet were in this respect placed quite on a level with the rope-dancer and the harlequin. Persons of this stamp were regularly pronounced by the censors (P. 446) incapable of serving in the burgess army or of voting in the burgess assembly. Moreover, not only was the direction of the stage regarded as pertaining to the province of the city police—a significant enough fact even in itself—but the police was probably, even at this period, invested with arbitrary powers of an extraordinary character against professional artists. Not only did the police magistrates, after the performance was over, sit in judgment on it—on which occasion wine flowed as copiously for those who had acquitted themselves well, as stripes fell to the lot of the bungler—but all the urban magistrates were legally entitled to inflict bodily chastisement and imprisonment on any actor at any time and at any place. The necessary effect of this was that dancing, music, and poetry, at least