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Excerpt from The Origin and Growth of the Roman Satiric Poetry Yet it was still wild and unfettered. Literary inuences were not yet at work; and the absence of any contemporary literature is in itself proof that the performers had no settled text. We shall in fact find that the introduction of a plot was a complete revolution and fatal to the very essence of such pieces. Masksll had been worn at the earliest festivals and may have been in use; but there can have been no attempt to represent character. The metre employed was the old Saturnian measure, - a system based indeed upon quantity, but allowing the greatest freedom in eliding, slurring, and strengthening syllables. Dependent to a large extent upon alliteration and a caesural pause marking the point at which one speaker gave place to another, it was rhyme rather than verse.° If we imagine the jests which the clown of a modern circus? Levels at the grooms to be spoken in doggerel verse, and his capers to be in time with the music of the band, and if we further sup ose both clown and grooms to be prompted not by pay but by a ove for rough fun, we have an approximate idea of the nature of the Satiric Drama. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.