Identifier: storyofancientna00west (find matches)
Title: The story of the ancient nations : a text-book for high schools
Year: 1912 (1910s)
Authors: Westermann, William Linn, 1873-1954
Subjects: History, Ancient
Publisher: New York : London : D. Appleton and Company
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: Sloan Foundation

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nic War. The sediles, who were directing thegames, permitted the exhibition of two Greek plays, acomedy and a tragedy. Livius Andronicus was asked totranslate them into Latin. This event was the beginningof dramatic performances in Rome, and, with the translationof the Odyssey, it marks the beginning of a Latin literature.There was nothing distinctively Roman about it. It wasthe Greek literature transplanted to Rome. 405. The Comedies of Plautus, (B. C. 250-184).—Duringthe Second Punic War an Umbrian named Plautus beganto adapt Greek comedies for the Roman stage. At thattime the New Comedy of Menander of Athens was delight-ing the Greek audiences in Syracuse and Tarentum. Soit was Menanders plays which Plautus re-wrote in Latinand sold to the Roman aediles for public exhibition. Twenty of the plays of Plautus have come down to us.The scene is always laid in Athens, or in some other Greekcity; and the comedies satirize the typical figures of the 324 THE STORY OF KOMH speare s Errors.
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Scene from a Roman Comedy.From a Mosaic at Naples. Athenian streets in the days after Alexander. There is the wealthy father who is devoted to his son; the miserly father; the son who is in love with some slave girl; the sly slave who helps the son in his love-affairs and fools his father. Usually the slave-girl proves to be some well-born young woman who has been stolen when she was a child, so that the love-affair turns out well. Plautus comedy of t h e twin-brothers, the MentBchmij was the model for Shake-Comedy ofThe miserof The Money-Pot of Plautus was imitated by the greatFrench comedy-writer, Moliere, in his play calledThe Avaricious Man. This is a good exampleof the greatest service which Rome did forthe world, in adopting Greek civilization andits literature, and handing down Greek worksto mediaeval and modern times, to serve asmodels and to give inspiration to laterwriters. 406. Terence (died 159 B.C.).—Terence was from Carthage, who washis childhood as a slave.He, too, tr

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