which they copied, and in this very fact
lay their principal charm, the Roman audience of this period was so
different from the Attic, that it was not even in a position rightly
to understand that foreign world. The Roman comprehended neither
the grace and kindliness, nor the sentimentalism and the whitened
emptiness of the domestic life of the Hellenes. The slave-world was
utterly different; the Roman slave was a piece of household furniture,
the Attic slave was a servant. Where marriages of slaves occur or a
master carries on a kindly conversation with his slave, the Roman
translators ask their audience not to take offence at such things
which are usual in Athens;(24) and, when at a later period comedies
began to be written in Roman costume, the part of the crafty servant
had to be rejected, because the Roman public did not tolerate slaves
of this sort overlooking and controlling their masters. The
professional figures and those illustrative of character, which were
sketched more broadly and farcically, bore the process of transference
better than the polished figures of every-day life; but even of those
delineations the Roman editor had to lay aside several--and these
probably 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 t