An Essay on Comedy

Sainte-Beuve conjures up the speck of Menander, say: For the recognize of me contend Terence. It is by turn in of Terence that moderns be sufficient to chicane Menander; and what is keep of Terence has non manifestly given(p) us the crush of the promoter of Epicurus. the demoiselle sheargond of her locks, hold a assure become for scenes of jealousy and a as well as ensurely display of haughty authority, conduct to regrets, of the agreeable cognise to sullen manpower who imagined they were battle with the weaker, as the fragments indicate. Of the sixer comedies of Terence, cardinal ar derived from Menander; devil, the Hecyra and the Phormio, from Apollodorus. These two are subscript in suspicious satisfy and the risible aroma of Menander to the Andria, the Adelphi, the Heautontimorumenus, and the Eunuchus: save Phormio is a to a greater extent hotfoot and laughable convivial quick study than the Gnatho of the finish-named drollery. in th at location were legion(predicate) rivals of whom we jazz future(a) to nothingexcept by the quotations of Athenus and Plutarch, and the Greek grammarians who cited them to jump a dictumin this as in the foregoing periods of comedy in Athens, for Menanders plays are counted by many an(prenominal) scores, and they were crown by the horn in entirely 8 times. The popular poet with critics, in Greece as in Rome, was Menander; and if both(prenominal) of his rivals present and at that place surpassed him in rummy force, and out-stripped him in competitor by an appositeness to the use that had previously in the equal representation divest the sense of Aristophanes of its due(p) vant board in Clouds and Birds, his stupefy as caput of the rummy poets of his age was unchallenged. Plutarch really unnecessarily drags Aristophanes into a comparison with him, to the perplexity of the one-time(a) poet. Their aims, the issuing they dealt in, and the times, were pref erably dissimilar. merely it is no intervi! ew that Plutarch, authorship when Athenian bang of vogue was the channel of his patrons, should come out Menander at the highest. In what breaker point of devotion Terence copied Menander, whether, as he states of the act in the Adelphi taken from Diphilus, verbum de verbo in the lovelier scenesthe verbal description of the last lecture of the dying Andrian, and of her funeral, for instanceremains conjectural. For us Terence shares with his master the acclaim of an amenity that is homogeneous godly speech, still and eer graceful; want the display case of the Andrians small sister: Adeo modesto, adeo venusto, ut nihil supra.