bly the very finest and most original, such as the Thais, the
match-maker, the moon-conjuress, and the mendicant priest of Menander
--and to keep chiefly to those foreign trades, with which the Greek
luxury of the table, already very generally diffused in Rome, had made
his audience familiar. If the professional cook and the jester in the
comedy of Plautus are delineated with so striking vividness and so
much relish, the explanation lies in the fact, that Greek cooks had
even at that time daily offered their services in the Roman market,
and that Cato found it necessary even to instruct his steward not to
keep a jester. In like manner the translator could make no use of a
very large portion of the elegant Attic conversation in his originals.
The Roman citizen or farmer stood in much the same relation to
the refined revelry and debauchery of Athens, as the German of a
provincial town to the mysteries of the Palais Royal. A science of
cookery, in the strict sense, never entered into his thoughts; the
dinner-parties no doubt continued to be very numerous in the Roman
imitation, but everywhere the plain Roman roast pork predominated
over the variety of baked meats and the refined sauces and dishes of
fish. Of the riddles and drinking songs, of the Greek rhetoric and
philosophy, which played so great a part in the originals, we meet
only a stray trace now and then in the Roman adaptation.

Construction of the Plot

The havoc, which the Roman editors were compelled in deference to
their audience to make in the originals, drove them inevitably into
methods of cancelling and amalgamating incompatible with any artistic
construction. It was usual not only to throw out whole character-
parts of the original, but also to insert others taken from other
comedies of the same or of another poet; a treatment indeed which,
owing to the outwardly methodical construction of the originals and
the recurrence of standing figures and incidents, was not quite so bad
as it might seem. Moreover the poets, at least in the earlier period,
allowed themselves the most singular liberties in the construction of
the plot. The plot of the -Stichus- (performed in 554) otherwise so
excellent turns upon the circumstance, that two sisters, whom their
father urges to abandon their absent husbands, play the part of
Penelopes, till the husbands return home with rich mercantile gains
and with a beautiful damsel as a present for their father-in-law.
In t