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, should rank Menander
at the highest. In what degree of faithfulness Terence copied Menander,
whether, as he states of the passage in the Adelphi taken from Diphilus,
verbum de verbo in the lovelier scenes--the description of the last
words of the dying