_THE COMIC FRAGMENTS._
Three Periods in Attic History.--The Three Kinds
of Comedy: Old, Middle, New.--Approximation of
Comedy to the Type of Tragedy.--Athenæus as the
Source of Comic Fragments.--Fragments of the Old
Comedy.--Satire on Women.--Parasites.--Fragments of
the Middle Comedy.--Critique of Plato and the Academic
Philosophers.--Literary Criticism.--Passages on Sleep
and Death.--Attic Slang.--The Demi-Monde.--Theophrastus
and the Later Rhetoricians.--Cooks and
Cookery-books.--Difficulty of Defining the Middle
from the New Comedy.--Menander.--Sophocles and
Menander.--Epicureanism.--Menander's Sober Philosophy
of Life.--Goethe on Menander.--Philemon.--The Comedy
of Manners culminated in Menander.--What we mean by
Modernism.--Points of Similarity and Difference between
Ancient and Modern Comedy.--The Freedom of Modern Art.
The two centuries during which comedy flourished at Athens may be
divided into three marked periods of national and political existence.
Between 448 and 404 B.C., under the Periclean administration and
until the end of the Peloponnesian war, the Demos continued through
all vicissitudes conscious of sovereignty and capable of indefinite
expansion. Then came the dismantlement of Athens by Lysander and the
dismemberment of the old democracy. From 404 to 338 B.C., Athens,
though humbled to the rank of a second-class State, and confused in
foreign and domestic policy, retained her freedom, and exercised an
important influence over the affairs of Hellas. She no longer, however,
felt within herself the force of youth, the ambition of conquest, or
the pride of popular autocracy. Her intellectual activity was turned
from political and constitutional questions inwards to philosophy
and literature. From 338 to about 260 B.C. this metamorphosis of the
nation was carried further and accomplished. Athens ceased to be a
city of statesmen and orators, and became the capital of learning.
She was no longer in any true sense free or powerful, though populous
and wealthy and frequented by cultivated men of all nations. Not only
had public interest declined, but the first fervor for philosophy was
past. A _modus vivendi_ suited to a tranquil, easy, pleasure-loving
people, who rejoiced in leisure and combined refined amusements with
luxury, had been systematized in the Epicurean view of life. To accept
the conditions of existence and to make the best of them, to look on
like spectators at the game of the world, and to raise no troublesome
insoluble questions, was the ideal of this period. Fifty years after
the last date mentioned, the Romans set their foot on Hellas, and Greek
culture began to propagate itself with altered forms in Italy.
To these three periods in the national existence of Athens the three
phases through which comedy passed correspond with almost absolute
accuracy. Emerging from the coarse Megarian farces and the phallic
pageants of the Dionysian Komos, the old comedy, as illustrated
by Aristophanes, allowed itself the utmost license. It incarnated
the freedom of democracy, caricaturing individuals, criticising
constitutional changes, and, through all its extravagances of burlesque
and fancy, maintaining a direct relation to politics. Only a nation in
the plenitude of self-contentment, conscious of vigor and satisfied
with its own energy, could have tolerated the kind of censorship these
comic poets dared to exercise. The glaring light cast by Aristophanes
upon abuses in the State reminded his audience of the greatness and
the goodness that subsisted with so much of mean and bad. From their
high standpoint of security they could afford, as they imagined, to
laugh, and to enjoy a spectacle that travestied their imperfections.
At the same time an undercurrent of antagonism to the Aristophanic
comedy made itself felt from time to time. Laws were passed prohibiting
this species of the drama in general (#mê kômôidein#), or restricting
its personality (#mê kômôidein onomasti#), or prohibiting the graver
functionaries of the State from exhibiting comic plays. These laws,
passed, abrogated, and repassed between 440 and 404 B.C., mark the ebb
and flow of democratic liberty. After the humiliation of Athens at
the close of the Peloponnesian war, the political subject-matter of
the old comedy was withdrawn, and the attitude of the audience was so
altered as to render its peculiar censorship intolerable. Meanwhile,
the speculative pursuits to which the Athenians since the days of the
sophists had addicted themselves began to tell upon the character of
the nation, now ripe for the second or literary stage of comedy. The
poets of this period had not yet arrived at the comedy of manners
which presents a close and faithful picture of domestic life. They
directed their wit and humor against classes rather than characters.
Philosophers and poets, parasites and hetæræ, took the place of the
politicians. Nor did they abandon the old art-form of Attic comedy,
for it is clear that the Chorus still played an important part in
their plays. At the same time, in comedy as in tragedy, the Chorus
came to be less and less an integral part of the drama; and while more
attention was paid to plot and story, the grotesque allegories of the
first period were dropped. The transition from the old to the middle
comedy is signalized by the _Frogs_ of Aristophanes, which, maintaining
the peculiar character of the elder form of art, relinquished politics
for literature. The new comedy, known to us through the fragments of
Menander and the Latin imitations, abandoned the Chorus altogether,
and produced a form of art corresponding to what we know as the
comedy of character and manners in the modern world. Interest was
concentrated on the fable, and the skill of the poet was displayed
in accurate delineations of domestic scenes. The plot seems to have
almost invariably turned on love-adventures. Certain fixed types of
character--the parasite, the pimp, the roguish servant, the severe
father, the professional captain, the spendthrift son, the unfortunate
heroine, and the wily prostitute--appeared over and over again. To vary
the presentation of these familiar persons taxed the ingenuity of the
playwright, as afterwards in Italy and France, during the tyranny of
pantaloon and matamore, Leandre and prima amorosa.
Tragedy and comedy, though they began so differently, had been
gradually approximating to one type, so that between Menander and the
latest followers of Euripides there was scarcely any distinction of
form and but little difference of subject-matter. The same sententious
reflection upon life seasoned both species of the drama. The religious
content of the elder tragedy and the broad burlesque of the elder
comedy alike gave place to equable philosophy. The tragic climax was
sad; the comic climax gay: more license was allowed in the comic
than in the tragic iambic: comedy remained nearer to real life and
therefore more interesting than tragedy. Such, broadly speaking, were
the limits of their differences now. In this approximation toward
artistic similarity comedy rather than tragedy was a gainer. It is
clear that the Aristophanic comedy could not have become permanent. To
dissociate it from the peculiar conditions of the Athenian democracy
was impossible. Therefore the process by which the old comedy passed
into the middle, and the middle into the new, must be regarded as a
progression from the local and the accidental to the necessary and the
universal. The splendor that may seem to have been sacrificed belonged
less to the old comedy itself than to the genius of Aristophanes,
who succeeded in engrafting the most brilliant poetry upon the rough
stock of the Attic farce. Tragedy, on the contrary, lost all when she
descended from the vantage-ground of Æschylus. It must not, however,
be imagined that the change in either case depended upon chance. It
was necessitated by the internal transmutation of the Athenians into
a nation of students, and by the corresponding loss of spontaneity
in art. For the full development of the comedy of manners a critical
temper in the poet and the audience, complexity of social customs, and
inclination to reflect upon them, together with maturity of judgment,
were required. These conditions, favorable to art which seeks its
motives in a spirit of tolerant, if somewhat cynical, philosophy, but
prejudicial to the highest serious poetry, account for the decline
of tragedy and the contemporaneous ascent of comedy in the fourth
century B.C. The comedy of Menander must therefore be considered as
an advance upon that of Cratinus, though it is true that this comedy
is the art of refined and senescent, rather than of vigorous and
adolescent, civilization, and though it flourished in the age of tragic
dissolution. In the Vatican may be seen two busts, of equal size and
beauty, wrought apparently by the same hand, and finished to the point
of absolute perfection. One of these is Tragedy, the other Comedy. The
two faces differ chiefly in the subtle smile that plays about the lips
of Comedy, and in the slight contraction of the brows of Tragedy. They
are twin sisters, born alike to royalty, distinguished by such traits
of character as tend to disappear beneath the polish of the world.
There is no suggestion of the Cordax in the one or of the Furies in the
other. Both are self-restrained and dignified in ideality. It was thus
that the two species of the drama appeared to the artists of the later
ages of Hellenic culture.
The student of Greek fragments may not inaptly be compared to a man who
is forming a collection of sea-weeds. Walking along the border of the
unsearchable ocean, he keeps his eyes fixed upon the pools uncovered
at low tide, and with his foot turns up the heaps of rubbish cast upon
the shore. Here and there a rare specimen of colored coralline or
delicately fibred alga attracts his attention. He stoops, and places
the precious fragment in his wallet, regretting that all his wealth is
but the alms of chance, tossed negligently to him by the fretful waves
and wilful storms. To tread the submarine gardens where these weeds and
blossoms flourish is denied him. Even so the scholar can do no more
than skirt the abysses of the past, the unsearchable sea of oblivion,
garnering the waifs and strays offered him by accident.
As Stobæus provides the most extensive repertory of extracts from the
later Greek tragedians, so it is to Athenæus we must turn for comic
fragments. This _helluo librorum_ boasted that he had read eight
hundred plays of the middle comedy, and it is obvious that he was
familiar with the whole dramatic literature of Athens. Yet the use he
made of this vast knowledge was comparatively childish. Interested for
the most part in deipnosophy, or the wisdom of the dinner-table, he
displayed his erudition by accumulating passages about cooks, wines,
dishes, and the Attic market. From an exclusive study, therefore,
of the extracts he transmitted, we might be led to imagine that the
Greek comedians exaggerated the importance of eating and drinking
to a ridiculous extent. This, however, would be a false inference.
The ingenuity of the deipnosophist was shown in bringing his reading
to bear upon a single point, and in adorning the philosophy of the
kitchen with purple patches torn from poetry. We ought, in truth,
rather to conclude that Attic comedy was an almost inexhaustible mine
of information on Attic life in general, and that illustrations,
infinitely various, of the manners, feelings, prejudices, literature,
and ways of thinking of the ancient Greeks might have been as liberally
granted to us as the culinary details which amused the mind of Athenæus.
When so much remains intact of Aristophanes, it is not worth while
to do more than mention a few of the fragments preserved from the
other playwrights of the old comedy. The first of these in Meineke's
collection may be translated, since it stands, like a motto, on the
title-page of all Greek comedy:[122] "Hear, O ye people! Susarion says
this, the son of Philinus, the Megarian, of Tripodiscus: Women are an
evil; and yet, my countrymen, one cannot set up house without evil;
for to be married or not to be married is alike bad." In turning over
the pages of Meineke,[123] we feel inclined to call attention to the
beauty of some lines on flowers written by Pherecrates (_Metalles_,
fr. 2, and _Persai_, fr. 2), and to a curious passage on the changes
wrought by Melanippides, Kinesias, and Timotheus in Attic music
(_Cheiron_, fr. 1). The comic description of the Age of Gold by
Telecleides (_Amphictyones_, fr. 1) might be paralleled by Heine's
picture of heaven, where the geese flew about ready roasted with ladles
of sweet sauce in their bills. What Hermippus says about the Attic
market (_Phormophoroi_, fr. 1) is interesting for a different reason,
since it throws real light upon the imports into Attica. The second
fragment from the same comedy yields curious information about Greek
wines. After mentioning the peculiar excellences of several sorts,
the poet gives the palm to Saprias, so called because of its old,
mellow, richly scented ripeness. "When the jar is opened, a perfume
goes abroad of violets and roses and hyacinths, a wonderful scent that
fills the house. This nectar is ambrosia and nectar in one. Keep it for
my friends, but to my enemies give Peparethian." Eupolis supplies a
description of parasites (_Kolakes_, fr. 1), the first detailed picture
of a class that played a prominent part in Attic social life.[124] We
may also mention, in passing, the fragment of a parabasis (_Incert.
Fab._ fr. 1) which censures the Athenian audience for preferring
foreign to native poets, and contains a reference to Aristophanes.
Phrynichus yields the beautiful epitaph on Sophocles (_Mousai_, fr. 1)
already quoted;[125] nor must his amusing caricature of a bad musician
be passed over (_Incert. Fab._ fr. 1), for the sake of this line:
#Mousôn skeletos, aêdonôn êpialos, hymnos Haidou,#
"Mummy of Muses, ague of nightingales, hymn of Hades." Those who are
curious about Greek games will do well to study the description of the
cottabos in Plato (_Zeus Kakoumenos_, fr. 1) and to compare with it a
fuller passage from Antiphanes[126] (_Aphrodites Gonai_). Plato, again,
presents us with a lively picture of a Greek symposium (_Lacones_,
fr. 1), as well as a very absurd extract from a cookery-book, whereof
the title was #Philoxenou kainê tis Opsartysia#, "A new Sauce-science
by Philoxenus" (_Phaon_, fr. 1). From Ameipsias might be selected
for passing notice an allusion to Socrates (_Konnos_, fr. 1) and a
scolion in two lines upon life and pleasure, sung to the flute at a
drinking-party (_Incert. Fab._ fr. 1). Finally, Lysippus has spoken the
praises of Athens in three burlesque iambics[127] (_Incert. Fab._ fr.
1): "If you have never seen Athens, you are a stock; if you have seen
her, and not been taken captive, a donkey; if you are charmed and leave
her, a pack-ass."
On quitting the old for the middle comedy we find ourselves in a
different intellectual atmosphere. The wit is more fine-spun, the humor
more allusive; language, metre, and sententious reflections begin alike
to be Euripidean. The fertility of the playwrights of this period was
astounding. Antiphanes, one of the earliest, produced, according to
some authorities, 260, and Alexis, one of the latest, 245 comedies
on a great variety of subjects. It is doubtful, however, whether the
authorship of these plays was accurately known by the Byzantine Greeks,
from whom our information is derived. The fragments show that a strong
similarity of style marked the whole school of poets, and that the
younger did not scruple to pilfer freely from the elder. On the whole,
the question of authorship is of less interest than the matters brought
to light by such extracts as we possess. It has been remarked above
that ridicule of the philosophers and parodies of the tragic poets
were standing dishes in the middle comedy. Antiphanes has a fling at
the elegant attire of the academic sages (_Antaios_), while Ephippus
describes a philosophical dandy of the same school (_Nauagos_, fr. 1,
p. 493). Their doctrines are assailed with mild sarcasm. A man, when
asked if he has a soul, replies: "Plato would tell me I don't know,
but I rather think I have" (Cratinus, _Pseudupobolimaios_, p. 516).
In another play some one is gently reminded that he is talking of
things about which he knows nothing--like Plato (Alexis, _Ankylion_,
p. 518). Again, Plato is informed that his philosophy ends in knowing
how to frown[128] (Amphis, _Dexidemides_, p. 482). In another place
it is discovered that his _summum bonum_ consists in refraining from
marriage and enjoying life (Philippides, _Ananeosis_, fr. 2, p. 670).
Other philosophers, the Pythagoreans (Alexis, _Tarantini_, frs. 1,
2, 3, pp. 565, 566), and Aristippus (_Galatea_, fr. 1, p. 526), for
example, come in for their share of ridicule. The playwrights not
unfrequently express their own philosophy, sad enough beneath the mask
of mirth. Very gloomy, for example, is the view of immortality recorded
by Antiphanes (_Aphrodisios_, fr. 2, p. 358); while the comparison by
Alexis of human life to a mad pastime enjoyed between two darknesses
(p. 566) has something in it that reminds one of a dance of death. Very
seldom has the insecurity of all things, leading to devil-may-care
self-indulgence, been more elegantly expressed than by Antiphanes
(_Stratiotes_, fr. 1, p. 397). Anaxandrides, for his part, formulates
theological agnosticism in words memorable for their pithy brevity
(_Canephorus_, p. 422):
#hapantes esmen pros ta thei' abelteroi
kouk ismen ouden;#
We're all mere dullards in divinity
And know just nothing.
One thing is clear in all such utterances, that the deeper speculations
of Plato and Aristotle had taken no hold on the minds of the people at
large, and that such philosophy as had penetrated Athenian society was
a kind of hedonistic scepticism. Epicurus, in the next age, had nothing
to do but to give expression to popular convictions. Take, for one
instance more, these lines from Amphis (_Gynæcocratia_, p. 481):
#pine, paize; thnêtos ho bios; oligos houpi gêi chronos.
athanatos d' ho thanatos estin, an hapax tis apothanêi.#
Drink and play, for life is fleeting; short our time beneath the sky:
But for death, he's everlasting, when we once have come to die.
Occasionally, the same keen Attic wit is exercised upon old-fashioned
Greek proverbs. Simonides had said that health, beauty, and moderate
wealth were the three best blessings. Anaxandrides demurs (_Thesaurus_,
fr. 1, p. 421): the poet was most certainly mad; for a handsome man, if
he be poor, is but an ugly beast.
A few of the fragments throw some light upon dramatic literature.
Antiphanes (_Poesis_, fr. 1, p. 392) compares tragedy and comedy with
covert irony: Blest indeed is the lot of a tragic play, for, to begin
with, the spectators know the whole legend by the name it bears, and
then, when the poet gets tired, he has only to lift the machine like
his finger, and, hocus-pocus, all is ended; but in a comedy everything
must be made from the beginning and explicitly set forth--persons,
previous circumstances, plot, catastrophe, and episode--and if a jot
or tittle is overlooked, Tom or Jerry in the pit will hiss us off
the stage. The cathartic power of tragedy is described by Timocles
(_Dionysiazusæ_, p. 614) in lines that sound like a common-sense
version of Aristotle: Man is born to suffer, and there are many painful
things in life; accordingly he has discovered consolation for his sad
thoughts in tragedies, which lure the mind away to think of greater
woes, and send the hearer soothed, and at the same time lessoned,
home--the poor man, for example, finds that Telephus was still more
poor, the sick man sees Alcmæon mad, the lame man pities Philoctetes
and forgets himself; if one has lost a son, Niobe is enough to teach
him resignation; and so on through all the calamities of life: gazing
at sufferings worse than our own, we are forced to be contented.
Some of the most charming of the comic fragments are descriptions of
sleep. A comedy variously ascribed to Antiphanes and Alexis bears the
name of Sleep, and contains a dialogue (p. 570), of which the following
is a version:
_A._ Not mortal, nor immortal, but of both
Blent in his being, so that gods nor men
Can claim him for their own; but ever fresh
He grows, and then dies off again to nothing,
Unseen by any, but well known to all.
_B._ Lady, you always charm me thus with riddles.
_A._ Yet what I say is clear and plain enough.
_B._ What boy is this that has so strange a nature?
_A._ Sleep, O my daughter, he that cures our ills.
Scarcely less delicate are the two following lines (pp. 749, 607):
#ho ti proika monon edôkan hêmin hoi theoi,
ton hypnon,#
and
#hypnos ta mikra tou thanatou mystêria.#[129]
In this connection I may quote a beautiful fragment from Diphilus
(_Incert. Fab._ fr. 5, p. 647) on Death and Sleep:
There is no life without its share of evil,
Griefs, persecutions, torments, cares, diseases:
Of these death comes to cure us, a physician
Who gives heart's ease by filling us with slumber.
Before engaging in a group of fragments more illustrative of common
Greek life, I will call attention to the examples of Attic slang
furnished by Anaxandrides (_Odysseus_, fr. 2, p. 424). To translate
them into equivalent English would tax the ingenuity of Frere; but it
is worth noticing that this _argot_, like that of our universities
or public schools, is made up of the most miscellaneous material.
Religious ritual, the theatre, personal peculiarities, the dust that is
the plague of Athens, articles of dress, and current fables all supply
their quota. It is, in fact, the slang of cultivated social life.
Next to cooks, parasites, and fishwives, the _demi-monde_ of Athens
plays the most prominent part in comedy of the middle period.[130] The
following couplet from a play of Philetærus (_Kunegis_, fr. 3, p. 477)
might be chosen as a motto for an essay on this subject:
#ouk etos hetairas hieron esti pantachou,
all' ouchi gametês oudamou tês Hellados.#
This pithily expresses the pernicious relation in which the mistress,
dignified by the name of companion, stood in Attic Hellas towards the
married wife. The superiority of the former over the latter in popular
appreciation is set forth with cynical directness by Amphis (_Athamas_,
fr. 1, p. 480).
The Greeks had no sort of shame about intersexual relations; and
of this perfect freedom of speech the comic poets furnish ample
illustration in their dealing with the subject of adultery. There is
not here the faintest trace of French romance. Sentiment of some kind
is required to season the modern breaches of the seventh commandment.
To the Greeks, who felt the minimum of romance in intersexual love,
adultery appeared both dangerous and silly, when the laws of Solon
had so well provided safety-valves for vice.[131] At the same time,
the pages of the comic poets abound in violent invectives against
licentious and avaricious women who were the ruin of young men.
Anaxilas (_Neottis_, fr. 1, p. 501), in a voluble invective against
"companions" of this sort, can find no language strong enough.
They are serpents, fire-breathing chimeras, Charybdis and Scylla,
sea-dogs, sphinxes, hydras, winged harpies, and so forth. Alexis
describes the arts whereby they make the most of mean attractions,
and suit their style to the current fashion (_Isostasion_, fr. 1, p.
537). Epicrates paints the sordid old age of once-worshipped Lais in
language that might serve as a classic pendant to Villon's _Regrets
de la belle Héaulimiere_ (_Antilaïs_, fr. 2, p. 510). In no point
does the civilized society of great cities remain so constant as in
the characteristics of Bohemian life. In this respect Athens seems to
have been much the same as Venice in the sixteenth, and Paris in the
nineteenth century.
What these playwrights say of love in general scarcely differs from the
opinions already quoted from the tragic poets. Amphis (_Dithyrambus_,
fr. 2, p. 482) and Alexis (_Helene_, p. 532; _Traumatias_, fr. 2, p.
569; _Phædrus_, fr. 1, p. 571; _Incert. Fab._ fr. 38, p. 582) may be
referred to by the curious. It is worth while at this point to mention
that some valuable illustrations of the later Attic comedy are to
be drawn from the collectors of characteristics, like Theophrastus,
and from rhetoricians who condensed the matter of the comic drama in
their prose. The dialogues of Lucian, the letters of Alciphron, the
moral treatises of Plutarch and Maximus Tyrius, and the dissertations
of Athenæus are especially valuable in this respect. Much that we
have lost in its integrity is filtered for us through the medium of
scholastic literature, performing for the middle comedy imperfectly
that which Latin literature has done more completely for the new.
In dealing with the old comedy, one reference has been already made to
cooks and cookery-books. In the middle comedy they assume still more
importance, and in the secondary authors of the new comedy they occupy
the foreground of the picture, thanks to Athenæus. Cooks at Athens
formed a class apart. They had their stations in the market, their
schools, their libraries of culinary lore, their pedantries and pride
and special forms of knavery. The Roman custom of keeping slaves to
cook at home had not yet penetrated into Greece. If a man wanted to
entertain his guests at a dinner-party, or to prepare a wedding-feast,
he had to seek the assistance of a professional _cordon bleu_, and the
great _chef_ ensconced himself for the day, with his subordinates,
in the house of his employer. It is clear that these customs offered
situations of rare comic humor to the playwright. Everybody had at
some time felt the need of the professional cook, and everybody had
suffered under him. In an age, moreover, which was nothing if it was
not literary, the cooks caught the prevailing tone, and professed their
art according to the rules of rhetoric.
#eis tous sophistas ton mageiron engraphô#[132]
exclaims one of the characters of Alexis (_Milesia_, fr. 1, p. 551),
after a scientific demonstration of the sin of letting sauces cool. A
paterfamilias in a play of Strato (_Phoenikides_, p. 703) complains
that he has brought a "male sphinx" in the shape of a cook into his
house. The fellow will not condescend to use any but Homeric language,
and the master is quite puzzled. It is in vain that he takes down the
Homeric glossary of Philetas. Even this does not mend matters. The
cook is a more recondite scholar than the grammarian. A professor
of the culinary art in a play of Nicomachus (_Eileithuia_, p. 717)
explains to his employer the broad scientific basis upon which the art
of cooking rests. Astrology, geometry, medicine, and natural history
are all necessary. Another, in Damoxenus (_Syntrophi_, p. 697),
discusses various schools of philosophy from the culinary point of
view. He begins by saying that he has spent four talents and nearly
three years in the school of Epicurus, and has learned that a cook who
has not mastered metaphysics is worthless. He must have Democritus
and Epicurus at his fingers' ends, understand the elements of fire
and water, comprehend the laws of harmony, and arrive at a profound
contempt for Stoical self-discipline.[133] The study of cookery-books
employs as much time and demands as much enthusiasm as the study of
the sages. A cook in Baton (_Euergetæ_, p. 685) shakes off sleep and
trims the midnight oil that he may meditate the weighty precepts of
his masters in the art.[134] Another, in Euphron (_Adelphi_, p. 679),
expounds the various virtues of his predecessors, and remarks that his
own peculiar merit consists in clever larceny. The same author makes
a cook explain to his pupil the distinctions he ought to observe in
catering for a club and for a wedding-party (_Synephebi_, p. 682). One
of the fragments of Menander turns, finally, upon the art of treating
guests of different nationalities to different dishes (_Trophonius_,
p. 46). In this passage Menander seems to have had in mind some lines
of Diphilus (_Apolipousa_, fr. 1, p. 633). Another curious extract
from the latter poet (_Zographus_, fr. 2, p. 638) consists of a long
harangue delivered by a master-cook to his _protégé_, a waiter,
concerning the advantages and disadvantages of various houses into
which he gains admittance by his art. A merchant just returned from
sea, a spendthrift heir, and a leader of the _demi-monde_ are good
customers because of their prodigality. On the whole, the impression
left upon our minds is that, what with democracy, all-pervading
pedantry, and professional pride, high life below stairs in Athens was
even more difficult to tolerate than it is in England.
To draw a firm line of demarcation between the middle and the new
comedy would be impossible. I have already expressed my opinion that
the comic drama culminated, within the limits determined for it by
antique society, in the art of Menander. The modulations through which
it passed before attaining to this final stage were numerous, and there
are indications that the types invented for the middle comedy persisted
in the new. What really created the third manner, and carried the comic
art to its perfection, was the appearance of a truly original genius in
the person of Menander. The playwrights who succeeded could not fail
to feel his influence, and plied their craft within the sphere he had
traced.
Menander was the nephew of Alexis, the pupil of Theophrastus, the
exact contemporary and intimate friend of Epicurus. From his uncle he
received the traditions of dramatic art; from his master he learned
the peripatetic method of analysis; together with his friend he put
in practice the philosophy of #ataraxia# which passes by the name
of Epicureanism. His adequacy to the spirit of his own age can only
be paralleled by that which we observe in Sophocles. As Sophocles
exactly represents the period of Attic perfection, so the sadder and
more sober years of disillusionment and premature decay find full
expression in Menander. His personal beauty, the love of refined
pleasure that distinguished him in life, the serene and genial temper
of his wisdom, the polish of his verse, and the harmony of parts he
observed in composition, justify us in calling Menander the Sophocles
of comedy. Like Sophocles, he showed the originality of his genius
by defining the limits of his art. He perfected the comic drama by
restricting it more closely to real life. The love-tales--#erôtes kai
parthenôn phthorai#--which Anaxandrides is said to have introduced,
became the fixed material of the new comedy. Menander, however, used
this subject-matter less for sensational effect or sentimental pathos
than for the expression of a deep and tranquil wisdom. If we were
to judge by the fragments transmitted to us, we should have to say
that Menander's comedy was ethical philosophy in verse; so mature is
their wisdom, so weighty their language, and so grave their tone. The
brightness of the beautiful Greek spirit is sobered down in him almost
to sadness. Middle age, with its maturity, has been substituted for
youth with its passionate intensity. Taking Menander for our guide,
we cannot cry: "You Greeks are always children." Yet the fact that
Stobæus found him a fruitful source of sententious quotations, and that
alphabetical anthologies were made of his proverbial sayings, ought not
to obscure his fame for drollery and humor. The highest praise awarded
by the Romans to Terence is contained in the apostrophe _dimidiate
Menander_; and it appears that what the Latin critics thought their
poet wanted was the salt of Attic wit, the playful ease and lively
sparkle of his master. It is certain that well-constructed plots,
profound analysis of character, refined humor, and ripe philosophy were
blent and subordinated to the harmony of beauty by Menander. If old
men appreciated his genial or pungent worldly wisdom, boys and girls
read him, we are told, for his love-stories. One thing at least he
never could have been--loud or vulgar. And for this reason, perhaps, we
learn less from Menander about parasites and cooks than from his fellow
dramatists.
Speaking broadly, the philosophy in vogue at Athens during the period
of the new comedy was what in modern days is known as Epicureanism.
This is proved by the frequent references made by playwrights to
pleasure as the _sumum bonum_,[135] as well as by their view of life in
general. Yet it would be unjust to confound the grave and genial wisdom
of Menander with so trivial a philosophy as that which may be summed up
in the sentence "Eat and drink, for to-morrow we die."[136] A fragment
from an unknown play of his expresses the pathos of human existence
with a depth of feeling that is inconsistent with mere pleasure-seeking
(p. 56):
When thou wouldst know thyself, what man thou art,
Look at the tombstones as thou passest by:
Within those monuments lie bones and dust
Of monarchs, tyrants, sages, men whose pride
Rose high because of wealth, or noble blood,
Or haughty soul, or loveliness of limb;
Yet none of these things strove for them 'gainst time:
One common death hath ta'en all mortal men.
See thou to this, and know thee who thou art.
Such moralizing sounds commonplace to us who have been lessoned by
the _memento mori_ of the Middle Ages. Yet it should be remembered
that, coming from a Greek of Menander's age, it claims originality of
insight, and even now a ring of freshness as well as of truth marks
its absolute sincerity. The following fragment (p. 58) again expresses
Stoical, rather than Epicurean, philosophy of life:
Being a man, ask not release from pain,
But strength to bear pain, from the gods above;
If thou wouldst fain escape all woe for aye,
Thou must become god, or, if not, a corpse.
The exquisite lines in which the life of man is compared to a fair,
wherefrom, when he has once seen the shows, he should be glad to pass
away again in quiet, might be adduced to prove, if it were necessary,
that Menander was no mere hedonist. To the same end might be quoted
the passage upon destiny, which explains that chance and providence
are only two names for one controlling power, face to face with which
human forethought is but smoke and nonsense.[137] There is something
even almost awful in the placid acquiescence of Menander. He has come
to the end of passions and pleasures; he expects pain and is prepared
to endure it; his happiness consists in tranquil contemplation of life,
from which he no longer hopes for more than what Balzac calls the _à
peu près_ of felicity.[138] This tranquillity does not diminish, but
rather increases, his power of enjoyment and the clearness of his
vision. He combines the exact knowledge of the scientific analyst
with judicial impartiality; and yet his worldly wisdom is not cold or
dry. To make selections from fragments, every word whereof is golden,
would be weary work; nor is it possible to preserve in translation
the peculiar savor of this Attic salt. Menander should be spared
this profanation. Before we leave him, let us remember what Goethe,
a man as like Menander as a modern man can be, has said of him: "He
is thoroughly pure, noble, great, and cheerful, and his grace is
unattainable. It is to be lamented that we possess so little of him,
but that little is invaluable."
The name of Philemon will always be coupled with that of Menander.
In their lifetime they were competitors, and the Athenian audience
preferred Philemon to his rival. Posterity in ancient days reversed
this judgment--with justice, if our scanty fragments may be taken as
sufficient basis for comparison. The lines in which Philemon praises
peace as the good vainly sought by sages, and declares that no painter
or statuary can compete with truth, are fair examples of his fluent
and at the same time polished style.[139] So are the comparison of
men with animals to the disadvantage of the former, and the invective
against Prometheus for dividing human nature into complex varieties
of character.[140] Yet there is an element of sophistry in these
examples, placing them below the pithy sayings of Menander. If I were
to choose one fragment as illustrative of Philemon, and at the same
time favorable to his reputation, it should be the following:[141]
Have faith in God and fear; seek not to know him;
For thou wilt gain naught else beyond thy search:
Whether he is or is not, shun to ask:
As one who is, and sees thee, always fear him.
The comedy of Menander determined the form of the drama in Rome, and,
through the influence of Plautus and Terence upon the renascent culture
of the sixteenth century, fixed the type of comedy in modern Europe.
We are often struck, in reading his fragments, with their modern tone
of thought and feeling. We recognize that here, as in the case of
Molière, is a man who "chastised men by drawing them as they are," and
that the men whom he chastised, the social follies he ridiculed, are
among us at the present day. This observation leads us to consider what
we mean by modernism, when we say we find it in ancient literature.
Sometimes the phrase is loosely used to indicate the permanent and
invariable qualities of human nature emergent from local and temporary
conditions. The chorus in the _Agamemnon_ upon the beautiful dead
warriors in the Trojan war is called modern because it comes home
directly to our own experience. Not their special mode of sepulture,
or the lamentation of captive women over their heaped-up mounds, or
the slaughter of human victims, or the trophies raised upon their
graves, are touched upon. Such circumstances would dissociate them,
if only accidentally, from our sympathies. It is the grief of those
who stay at home and mourn, the pathos of youth and beauty wasted,
that Æschylus has chosen for his threnos. This grief and this pathos
are imperishable, and are therefore modern, inasmuch as they are not
specifically ancient. Yet such use of the phrase is inaccurate. We come
closer to the true meaning through the etymology of the word modern,
derived perhaps from _modo_, or _just now_; so that what is modern is,
strictly speaking, that which belongs to the present moment. From this
point of view modernism must continually be changing, for the moment
now is in perpetual flux. Still, there is one characteristic of the now
which comprehends the modern world, that does not and cannot alter: we
are never free from the consciousness of a long past. _Nous vieillards
nés d'hier_ is essentially true of us; and to this characteristic may
be referred what we mean to express by modernism. When nations have
reached a certain growth and pitch of culture, certain sentiments,
affectations, ways of thinking, modes of self-expression, habits of
life, fashions, and the like, appear as the outcome of complex and
long-established social conditions. Whatever may be the political
groundwork of the national existence, the phase in question is sure to
manifest itself, if only the nation lasts for a sufficient length of
time. We, who have assuredly arrived at the climacteric in question,
when we recognize the signs of it elsewhere, call them modern; and
nowhere can we find them more emphatically marked than in the age of
Attic ripeness that produced Menander. "O Menander and life," said the
grammarian of Alexandria, "which of you is the imitator of the other?"
This apostrophe might also have been addressed to Homer; but what
made it more specially applicable to Menander was that, while Homer
invested the profound truths of passion and action with heroic dignity,
Menander drew a no less faithful picture of human life together with
the accidents of civilized and social circumstance. His delicate
delineation of Attic society seemed nearer to the Alexandrian scholar,
because it reproduced, not the remote conditions of the prehistoric
age, but those which are common to periods of advanced culture. For
a like reason he seems to us more obviously modern than Homer. He
contemplates the drama of human life with eyes and mind not very
differently trained from ours, and from a point of view close to ours.
As a single instance, take this fragment. He is quietly laughing at the
pompous and pretentious sages who said in Athens, as they say now, that
a man must go into the wilderness to discover truth:
#heuretikon einai phasi tên erêmian
hoi tas ophrys airontes.#
We must not, however, be blinded by the modernism of Menander to the
fact that ancient comedy differed in many most important respects from
the comedy of modern Europe. If we only regard dramas of intrigue and
manners, such as the _Mandragola_ of Machiavelli, the _Volpone_ of
Ben Jonson, or the _Fourberies de Scapin_ of Molière, we are indeed
dealing with a type of comedy derived directly through the Latin from
the Greek. But modern comedy does not remain within these narrow
limits. Its highest products are either works of pure creative fancy,
like Shakespeare's _Midsummer-Night's Dream_ and Fletcher's _Pilgrim_,
or are so closely allied to tragedy, as in the case of Massinger's
_A New Way to Pay Old Debts_ and Molière's _Avare_, that only a
nominal difference divides the two species. Nothing remains, either
in fragments or in critical notices, to justify us in believing that
the ancients developed either the serious comedy, essentially tragic
in its ruthless revelation of a hell of evil passion, or the comedy of
pure imagination. Their strict sense of the requirements of external
form excluded the former kind of drama, while for the creation of the
latter the free play of the romantic fancy was absolutely necessary.
The total loss of Agathon, Chæremon, and other tragic poets of the
post-Euripidean period, forces us to speak with reservation on this
topic. There are many indications of a confusion of types at Athens
during the fourth century B.C. analogous to that which characterizes
modern dramatic poetry. Yet it may be asserted with tolerable
confidence that, while the Greeks understood by comedy a form of art
that aimed at exciting mirth and was confined within the limits of
domestic life, modern comedy has not unfrequently in her higher flights
excited the passions of terror and pity, and has quitted the region
of diurnal prose for the dream-world of fairyland. An ancient critic
would have probably observed that Molière's _Avare_ was too seriously
sinister to be rightly called comic, and that the absence of parody or
burlesque in Shakespeare's _Tempest_ excluded that play from comparison
with the _Birds_ of Aristophanes. Here, then, as elsewhere, we have
to notice the greater freedom demanded by the modern fancy in dealing
with the forms of art, together with the absence of those firmly traced
critical canons to which the antique genius willingly submitted. Modern
art in general, when it is not directly and consciously imitative of
antique models, demands a more complete liberation of the spiritual
element. We cannot avoid _les défauts de nos qualités_. This superior
freedom involves a bewildering complexity and intermixture of the
serious and the ludicrous, the lyrical and the dramatic, the positive
and the fanciful, defying classification, and in its very caprice
approximating to the realities of existence.
FOOTNOTES:
[122] Compare Anaxandrides (_Incert. Fab._ fr. 1), Eubulus
(_Chrysilla_, fr. 2; _Nannion_, fr. 1), Alexis (_Manteis_, fr. 1;
_Incert. Fab._ fr. 34, 39), and the anonymous fragments on p. 756 of
Didot's _Comici Græci_.
[123] I shall use the edition of Didot, one vol., 1855, for reference.
[124] Compare Antiphanes (_Didumoi_, fr. 2; _Progonoi_, fr. 1),
Alexis (_Kubernetes_, fr. 1), Diodorus (_Epikleros_, fr. 1), Timocles
(_Drakontion_, fr. 1), the long passage from an uncertain play of
Nicolaus. The invention of the part of the Parasite is usually ascribed
to Alexis, but this is clearly a mistake. That he developed it and made
it a fixed character of comedy is probable enough. The _Symposium_
of Xenophon furnishes curious matter on the professional joker and
diner-out as he existed at Athens.
[125] See above, vol. i. p. 442.
[126] The following anonymous line (Didot's _Comici Græci_, p. 732),
#synepinomen te kai synekottabizomen#, "together we drank, and played
at cottabos together," seems to point to the good fellowship of the
game.
[127] Compare the praises of Athens quoted from anonymous comic poets
by Athenæus, i. 20, B., and by Dio Chrysost., 64, p. 334, Reisk
(Didot's _Comici Græci_, pp. 723, 729).
[128] Compare Alexis (_Hippeus_, p. 536; _Meropis_, p. 550;
_Olympiodorus_, p. 552; _Parasitus_, fr. 3, p. 558).
[129]
The only free gift which the gods gave men,
To sleep.
Sleep, that prepares our souls for endless night.
[130] The great subject of cooks I leave for discussion in relation to
the New Comedy. See below, pp. 229-231.
[131] The passages alluded to above are Eubulus (_Nannion_, fr.
1, p. 449), Xenarchus (_Pentathlos_, fr. 1, p. 624), and Philemon
(_Adelphoi_, fr. 1).
[132] Mid the philosophers I count the cook.
[133] Compare Sosipater (_Katapseudomenos_, p. 677) for a similar
display of science; Euphron (_Incert. Fab._ fr. 1, p. 682), for a
comparison of cooks with poets; Hegesippus (_Adelphi_, p. 676), for an
egregious display of culinary tall-talk.
[134] Pollux mentions a list of celebrated authors on cookery.
[135] See in particular Hegesippus (_Philetæri_, p. 676); Baton
(_Androphonus_, fr. 1, p. 684, and _Synexapaton_, fr. 1, p. 686), and
Damoxenus (_Syntrophi_, pp. 697, 698).
[136] The fragment from the #Halieis#, p. 3 of Didot's _Menander_, is
clearly dramatic, and cannot be taken as an expression of the poet's
mind.
[137] Those fragments are from the #Hypobolimaios#, pp. 48, 49.
[138] Compare #Boiôtia#, fr. 2, p. 9; #Misogynês#, fr. 1, p. 32;
#Plokion#, fr. 8, p. 42.
[139] Pp. 114, 115.
[140] Pp. 118, 119.
[141] _Incert. Fab._ fr. 26, p. 122. Cf. ib. fr. 86.