dies of conspicuous fame.
Menander idealized them without purposely elevating. He satirized a
certain Thais, and his Thais of the Eunuchus of Terence is neither
professionally attractive nor repulsive; his picture of the two Andrians,
Chrysis and her sister, is nowhere to be matched for tenderness. But the
condition of honest women in his day did not permit of the freedom of
action and fencing dialectic of a Celimene, and consequently it is below
our mark of pure Comedy.

Sainte-Beuve conjures up the ghost of Menander, saying: For the love of
me love Terence. It is through love of Terence that moderns are able to
love Menander; and what is preserved of Terence has not apparently given
us the best of the friend of Epicurus. [Greek text which cannot be
reproduced] the lover taken in horror, and [Greek text] the damsel shorn
of her locks, have a promising sound for scenes of jealousy and a too
masterful display of lordly authority, leading to regrets, of the kind
known to intemperate men who imagined they were fighting with the weaker,
as the fragments indicate.

Of the six comedies of Terence, four are derived from Menander; two, the
Hecyra and the Phormio, from Apollodorus. These two are inferior in comic
action and the peculiar sweetness of Menander to the Andria, the Adelphi,
the Heautontimorumenus, and the Eunuchus: but Phormio is a more dashing
and amusing convivial parasite than the Gnatho of the last-named comedy.
There were numerous rivals of whom we know next to nothing--except by the
quotations of Athenaeus and Plutarch, and the Greek grammarians who cited
them to support a dictum--in this as in the preceding periods of comedy
in Athens, for Menander's plays are counted by many scores, and they were
crowned by the prize only eight times. The favourite poet with critics,
in Greece as in Rome, was Menander; and if some of his rivals here and
there surpassed him in comic force, and out-stripped him in competition
by an appositeness to the occasion that had previously in the same way
deprived the genius of Aristophanes of its due reward in Clouds and
Birds, his position as chief of the comic poets of his age was
unchallenged. Plutarch very unnecessarily drags Aristophanes into a
comparison with him, to the confusion of the older poet. Their aims, the
matter they dealt in, and the times, were quite dissimilar. But it is no
wonder that Plutarch, writing when Athenian beauty of style was the
delight of his patrons, sh