nd to one hundred and fifty-two in the _Amphitruo_. In
this way it becomes a short realistic story of every-day people, involving
frequently a love intrigue, and told in the iambic senarius, the simplest
form of verse. Following it is the more extended narrative of the comedy
itself, with its incidents and dialogue. This combination of the
condensed narrative in the story form, presented usually as a monologue in
simple verse, and the expanded narrative in the dramatic form, with its
conversational element, may well have suggested the writing of a realistic
novel in prose. A slight, though not a fatal, objection to this theory
lies in the fact that the prologues to comedy subsequent to Plautus
changed in their character, and contain little narrative. This is not a
serious objection, for the plays of Plautus were still known to the
cultivated in the later period.

The mime gives us still more numerous points of contact with the work of
Petronius than comedy does.[86] It is unfortunate, both for our
understanding of Roman life and for our solution of the question before
us, that only fragments of this form of dramatic composition have come
down to us. Even from them, however, it is clear that the mime dealt with
every-day life in a very frank, realistic way. The new comedy has its
conventions in the matter of situations and language. The matron, for
instance, must not be presented in a questionable light, and the language
is the conversational speech of the better classes. The mime recognizes no
such restrictions in its portrayal of life. The married woman, her stupid
husband, and her lover are common figures in this form of the drama, and
if we may draw an inference from the lately discovered fragments of Greek
mimes, the speech was that of the common people. Again, the new comedy has
its limited list of stock characters--the old man, the tricky slave, the
parasite, and the others which we know so well in Plautus and Terence, but
as for the mime, any figure to be seen on the street may find a place in
it--the rhetorician, the soldier, the legacy-hunter, the inn-keeper, or
the town-crier. The doings of kings and heroes were parodied. We are even
told that a comic Hector and Achilles were put on the stage, and the gods
did not come off unscathed. All of these characteristic features of the
mime remind us in a striking way of the novel of Petronius. His work, like
the mime, is a realistic picture of low life which presents a