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Three Millennia of Greek Literature
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Please note that Mommsen uses the AUC chronology (Ab Urbe Condita), i.e. from the founding of the City of Rome. You can use this reference table to have the B.C. dates

THE HISTORY OF OLD ROME

IV. The Revolution

From: The History of Rome, by Theodor Mommsen
Translated with the sanction of the author by William Purdie Dickson


The History of Old Rome

Chapter XIII - Literature and Art

ELPENOR EDITIONS IN PRINT

The Original Greek New Testament

» Contents of this Chapter

Page 63

Finally, music and dancing passed over in like manner from Greece to Rome, solely in order to be there applied to the enhancement of decorative luxury. Such foreign arts were certainly not new in Rome; the state had from olden time allowed Etruscan flute-players and dancers to appear at its festivals, and the freedmen and the lowest class of the Roman people had previously followed this trade. But it was a novelty that Greek dances and musical performances should form the regular accompaniment of a genteel banquet.

Another novelty was a dancing-school, such as Scipio Aemilianus full of indignation describes in one of his speeches, in which upwards of five hundred boys and girls--the dregs of the people and the children of magistrates and of dignitaries mixed up together--received instruction from a ballet-master in far from decorous castanet-dances, in corresponding songs, and in the use of the proscribed Greek stringed instruments. It was a novelty too-- not so much that a consular and -pontifex maximus- like Publius Scaevola (consul in 621) should catch the balls in the circus as nimbly as he solved the most complicated questions of law at home-- as that young Romans of rank should display their jockey-arts before all the people at the festal games of Sulla.

The government occasionally attempted to check such practices; as for instance in 639, when all musical instruments, with the exception of the simple flute indigenous in Latium, were prohibited by the censors. But Rome was no Sparta; the lax government by such prohibitions rather drew attention to the evils than attempted to remedy them by a sharp and consistent application of the laws.

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Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/rome/4-13-literature-art.asp?pg=63