Personae oscae e il riso popolare nelle atellane

Fabula atellana, a short satiric composition with formed types of characters, is the subject of this study. The available resources we can investigate are limited to pure notes about Atellan Farces which were mentioned in letters and works by significant roman personalities. There are also available real fragments of Atellan Farces which were well preserved mainly in works by Nonius the grammarian. In the beginning (about 4th century BC) the Atellan Farces used to be a sort of a improvisational comedy that was performed by amateur inhabitant of the Oscan town Attela situated in today's Italian Campania. The Romans probably got acquainted with Atellan Farces during Samnite Wars and brought them to Rome where they were introduced in some time on theatre stages in form of Exodia, the tragedy afterpieces. Atellan Farces passed through the written and non-written phases. We were interested how former Oscan Atellan Farces could have looked like, how the Roman youth transformed them when performed in Rome and what remained unchanged in a written form, they received from Latin poets Pomponius and Novius. The improvisational Atellan Farces must have been very popular in Rome because they survived in non-written form more than one century. It seams the Latin poets adopted the typical Italian humor, folk themes and of course the Personae Oscae, fixed masks with characteristic features. We understand Fabula atellana, the folk theatre genre, to be a laughing culture expression in its beginning and the folk laugh according to our opinion mainly represents "material corporal down" here. We have chosen those fragments where the material corporal elements occur and which were preserved in such a form that we can sense that folk laughter retained by the Latin poets in the smart puns or euphemisms. The Romans liked the Oscan farces, and therefore they might have kept the folk themes and naturally the fixed masks with characteristic features. Other quotations have been chosen to present the typical personalities of these characters characterised also by their proper names. It could be interesting to ask if a today's spectator would laugh if he saw Atellan Farces and what could a long time ago extinct comic genre and today's comicality have in common. Meanwhile, we have tried to track the italic features of the Atellan Farces from the quoted fragments.