the best of the eleven opere serie produced by Cimarosa, even though the composer himself considered 1797's Artemisia, regina di Caria "the most passable" of his works. It represents the typical example, not so much of the second half of the 18th century’s dramma per musica in general, as that of the special kind of melodrama which was forced into fashion in the century’s last decade, following in the wake of revolutionary France’s military successes. The new fashion required melodrama to share in the new times by adequately exalting the republican virtues of ancient Rome. Rodolfo Celletti writes: "Cimarosa had already happened to occupy himself with Gaius Marius and Junius Brutus, but it was unintentionally. Now with Orazi e Curiazi, and the following year with Attilio Regolo, he was to give a more specific contribution to the exaltation of the republican myths". In the end, however, the composer still remained quite the same and according to Celletti it brought about the conclusion "that the opera hadn’t anything intimately tragic or really heroic. ... We have to consider everything according to the use it was conceived for. In Oriazi e Curiazi, an archetype of the classicist and 'republican' drama between the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, we must see a kind of elegant evolutive operation in ultra-conservatism ... As to musical habit, the republican melodrama by Cimarosa and others was adorned with some more embellishment and accepted clangs of trumpets and some marches in order to remain, substantially, the one it had always been at the time of court theatres: a source of lyric effusions and not of epic [bursts]." The musicologist Francesco Florimo, Bellini’s friend, chanced to observe: "sometimes Cimarosa gives himself up to a more lyric than tragic affection, at other times to vocalisms and graces which can only be borne in the comic genre". According to Celletti it is rather hard to claim Gli Orazi e i Curiazi as a masterpiece, as it is for such a large part of the second half of the 18th century’s Italian opera seria. "Domenico Cimarosa was the standard-bearer of our comic musical theatre and … it is clear that the comic operist not only prevails over the serious one but it rather often gets out of his control and inspires him". So it happens in the duet between Curiatius and Horatius that opens with "the