Persons of this stamp were regularly pronounced by the censors( 7) incapable of serving in the burgess-army and 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 fact significant enough even in itself--but the police was probably, even at this period, invested with arbitrary powers of an extraordinary character against professional stage-artists.

Not only did the police magistrates sit in judgment on the performance after its conclusion--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 so far as they appeared on the public stage, fell into the hands of the lowest classes of the Roman burgesses, and especially into those of foreigners; and while at this period poetry still played altogether too insignificant a part to engage the attention of foreign artists, the statement on the other hand, that in Rome all the music, sacred and profane, was essentially Etruscan, and consequently the ancient Latin art of the flute, which was evidently at one time held in high esteem,( 8) had been supplanted by foreign music, may be regarded as already applicable to this period.
There is no mention of any poetical literature.

Neither the masked plays nor the recitations of the stage can have had in the proper sense fixed texts; on the contrary, they were ordinarily improvised by the performers themselves as circumstances required.