With less taste and stronger party tendencies than the Scipionic epoch showed, Ennius, Pacuvius, and especially Plautus were now exalted to the skies.

The leaves of the Sibyl rose in price, the fewer they became; the relatively greater nationality and relatively greater productiveness of the poets of the sixth century were never more vividly felt than in this epoch of thoroughly developed Epigonism, which in literature as decidedly as in politics looked up to the century of the Hannibalic warriors as to the golden age that had now unhappily passed away beyond recall.
No doubt there was in this admiration of the old classics no small portion of the same hollowness and hypocrisy which are characteristic of the conservatism of this age in general; and here too there was no want of trimmers.

Cicero for instance, although in prose one of the chief representatives of the modern tendency, revered nevertheless the older national poetry nearly with the same antiquarian respect which he paid to the aristocratic constitution and the augural discipline; "patriotism requires," we find him saying, "that we should rather read a notoriously wretched translation of Sophocles than the original." While thus the modern literary tendency cognate to the democratic monarchy numbered secret adherents enough even among the orthodox admirers of Ennius, there were not wanting already bolder judges, who treated the native literature as disrespectfully as the senatorial politics.

Not only did they resume the strict criticism of the Scipionic epoch and set store by Terence only in order to condemn Ennius and still more the Ennianists, but the younger and bolder men went much farther and ventured already--though only as yet in heretical revolt against literary orthodoxy--to call Plautus a rude jester and Lucilius a bad verse-smith.

This modern tendency attached itself not to the native authorship, but rather to the more recent Greek literature or the so-called Alexandrinism.
The Greek Alexandrinism We cannot avoid saying at least so much respecting this remarkable winter-garden of Hellenic language and art, as is requisite for the understanding of the Roman literature of this and the later epochs.