CHAPTER XV.
SECTION I.
FROM THE END OF THE FIRST PUNIC WAR TO THE END OF THE SECOND.
Spain first he won, the Pyrenieans pass'd, And sleepy Alps, the mounds that nature cast; And with corroding juices, as he went, A passage through the living rocks he rent, Then, like a torrent rolling from on high, He pours his headlong rage on Italy .-- _Juvenal_.
1.

The war being ended between the Carthagin'ians and Romans, a profound peace ensued, and in about six years after, the temple of Ja'nus was shut for the second time since the foundation of the city.[1] 2.

The Romans being thus in friendship with all nations, had an opportunity of turning to the arts of peace; they now began to have a relish for poetry, the first liberal art which rises in every civilized nation, and the first also that decays.3.Hitherto they had been entertained only with the rude drolleries of their lowest buffoons, who entertained them with sports called Fescen'nine, in which a few debauched actors invented their own parts, while raillery and indecency supplied the place of humour.4.To these a composition of a higher kind succeeded, called satire; a sort of dramatic poem, in which the characters of the great were particularly, pointed out, and made an object of derision to the vulgar.
[Sidenote: U.C.

514.] 5.

After these, came tragedy and comedy, which were borrowed from the Greeks: indeed, the first dramatic poet of Rome, whose name was Liv'ius Andronicus, was a native of one of the Greek colonies in southern Italy.6.The instant these finer kinds of composition appeared, this great people rejected their former impurities with disdain.