, not only through their subject-matter
--in which respect the newer comedy was distinguished from the old as
much by the greater intrinsic emptiness as by the greater outward
complication of the plot--but more especially through their execution
in detail, in which the point and polish of the conversation more
particularly formed the triumph of the poet and the delight of the
audience. Complications and confusions of one person with another,
which very readily allowed scope for extravagant, often licentious,
practical jokes--as in the -Casina-, which winds up in genuine
Falstaffian style with the retiring of the two bridegrooms and of the
soldier dressed up as bride--jests, drolleries, and riddles, which in
fact for want of real conversation furnished the staple materials of
entertainment at the Attic table of the period, fill up a large
portion of these comedies. The authors of them wrote not like Eupolis
and Aristophanes for a great nation, but rather for a cultivated
society which spent its time, like other clever circles whose
cleverness finds little fit scope for action, in guessing riddles and
playing at charades. They give us, therefore, no picture of their
times; of the great historical and intellectual movements of the age
no trace appears in these comedies, and we need to recall, in order
to realize, the fact that Philemon and Menander were really
contemporaries of Alexander and Aristotle. But they give us a
picture, equally elegant and faithful, of that refined Attic society
beyond the circles of which comedy never travels. Even in the dim
Latin copy, through which we chiefly know it, the grace of the
original is not wholly obliterated; and more especially in the pieces
which are imitated from Menander, the most talented of these poets,
the life which the poet saw and shared is delicately reflected not so
much in its aberrations and distortions as in its amiable every day
course. The friendly domestic relations between father and daughter,
husband and wife, master and servant, with their love-affairs and
other little critical incidents, are portrayed with so broad a
truthfulness, that even now they do not miss their effect: the
servants' feast, for instance, with which the -Stichus- concludes is,
in the limited range of its relations and the harmony of the two
lovers and the one sweetheart, of unsurpassed gracefulness in its
kind. The elegant grisettes, who make their appearance perfumed and
adorned, w