Strange thing! how bold and swift the monster was! That neither cared for wind, nor hail, nor rain, Nor swelling waves, but thorough them did pass So proudly, that she made them roar again.”
Among the shorter fragments of Attius we meet with many scattered sentiments, which have been borrowed by subsequent poets and moral writers. The expression, “oderint dum metuant,” occurs in the _Atreus_. Thus, too, in the _Armorum Judicium_,—
“Nam trophæum ferre me a forti pulchrum est viro; Si autem et vincar, vinci a tali, nullum est probrum.”
“Virtuti sis par—dispar fortunis patris,”
has suggested to Virgil the affecting address—
“Disce, puer, virtutem ex me, verumque laborem; Fortunam ex aliis: ——”
This play, which turns on the contest of Ajax and Ulysses for the arms of Achilles, has also supplied a great deal to Ovid. The tragic poet makes Ajax say—
“Quid est cur componere ausis mihi te, aut me tibi.”
In like manner, Ajax, in his speech in Ovid—
—— “Agimus, prô Jupiter, inquit, Ante rates causam, et mecum confertur Ulysses!”
There are two lines in the _Philoctetes_, which present a fine image of discomfort and desolation—
“Contempla hanc sedem, in qua ego novem hiemes, saxo stratus, pertuli, Ubi horrifer aquilonis stridor gelidas molitur nives(350).”
Most of the plays of Attius, as we have seen, were taken from the Greek tragedians. Two of them, however, the _Brutus_ and the _Decius_, hinged on Roman subjects, and were both probably written in compliment to the family of his patron, Decius Brutus. The subject of the former was the expulsion of the Tarquins: but the only passage of it extant, is the dream of Tarquin, and its interpretation, which have been preserved by Cicero in his work _De Divinatione_. Tarquin’s dream was, that he had been overthrown by a ram which a shepherd had presented to him, and that while lying wounded on his back, he had looked up to the sky, and observed that the sun, having changed his course, was journeying from west to east. The first part of this dream being interpreted, was a warning, that he would be expelled from his kingdom by one whom he accounted as stupid as a sheep; and the solar phenomenon portended a popular change in the government. The interpreter adds, that such strange dreams could not have occurred without the purpose of some special manifestation, but that no attention need be paid to those which merely present to us the daily transactions of life—