)--those actors, I say, were
therefore called histriones: and that name has since remained, not
only to actors Roman born, but to all others of every nation. They
played, not the former extempore stuff of Fescennine verses or
clownish jests, but what they acted was a kind of civil cleanly
farce, with music and dances, and motions that were proper to the
subject.
In this condition Livius Andronicus found the stage when he
attempted first, instead of farces, to supply it with a nobler
entertainment of tragedies and comedies. This man was a Grecian
born, and being made a slave by Livius Salinator, and brought to
Rome, had the education of his patron's children committed to him,
which trust he discharged so much to the satisfaction of his master
that he gave him his liberty.
Andronicus, thus become a freeman of Rome, added to his own name
that of Livius, his master; and, as I observed, was the first author
of a regular play in that commonwealth. Being already instructed in
his native country in the manners and decencies of the Athenian
theatre, and conversant in the archaea comaedia or old comedy of
Aristophanes and the rest of the Grecian poets, he took from that
model his own designing of plays for the Roman stage, the first of
which was represented in the year CCCCCXIV.
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