ATELLANAE FABULAE, a sort of farce, popular in Republican and early Imperial Rome. The ancients derived the name, probably with justice, from the town Atella in Campania. If this is so, then the farces were of Oscan origin, very likely in fluenced by the Greek farces of Tarentum and other cities. Strabo (v. 3, 6) even says that in his own day (time of Augustus), although Oscan had died out, farces for performance at religious festivals were still written in it ; but this need mean no more than that their language was rustic Latin. According to Livy (vii. 2, I I) they were often acted by amateurs, and to be an actor of Atellanae did not, like ordinary acting, involve loss of civic status. In the last century B.C., when a taste arose for farces (exodia) to be played after tragedies, perhaps on the analogy of Greek satyr-plays, Atellanae became a literary genre, and we have some fragments of a writer of them, L. Pomponius of Bononia (Bologna) ; see Ribbeck, Scaenicae Romanorurn poesis fragments; there are also a few remnants of two or three other authors. We learn, from these and other sources, that there were four stock characters, Maccus the glutton, Bucco the simple ton, Pappus (Pantaloon), and Dossenus (Punch, a clever, ras cally hunchback) ; that the actors wore masks ; that the plot was generally taken from everyday Italian life, but was sometimes para-tragic ; and that the language was Latin, with all manner of oddities and extravagances of diction. They finally disappeared, owing to the popularity of the mimus, about the time of Tiberius.
See Gesch. der rom. Literatur, i. (bibl.) .