Chrysostom. Who can appreciate or understand Aristophanes, who knows little or nothing of Pericles, Cleon, Nicias; of Eschylus and Euripides; of Socrates and the Sophists? But Menander wrote from common universal nature, of hard or doating fathers, gay and dissolute sons, misers, self-tormentors, parasites, sycophants, crafty and unprincipled slaves; even if his more questionable characters, his Hetæræ, his lenones, were more peculiar to Athenian society, and to the manners of his own day. In him there was little which could become of necessity obsolete, and require the elucidating commentary. His plays seem to have been acted to the time of Plutarch;* at convivial banquets they were held to be indispensable as wine. But whatever may be the truth in the tradition preserved by a late writer (Alcyonius de Exilio) who had heard from Demetrius Chalcondylest that the Greek priests prevailed on the Byzantine Emperors to order the poems of Menander, Philemon, Sappho, Mimnermus, Alcæus, and other poets, to be burned, and that the poems of Gregory of Nazianzum should be substituted in their place in the schools, we fear, notwithstanding the prophecy of Ovid as to the perpetuity of Menander's poety

'Cum fallax servus, durus pater, improba lena, Vixerit, et meretrix blanda, Menander erit'

that roguish slaves and harsh fathers, to say nothing of those of worse repute, subsisted in Constantinople long after Menander had ceased to fill the theatre and amuse the banquet. As to the theatre, it was not, perhaps, so much religious, austere, and chaste Christianity which closed the stage against the lofty tragedy and the gay comedy of the ancients, as the rivalry of more turbulent, exciting, and sensual amusements-the chariot-races, with their blue and green factions, whose victories shook the throne of Justinian; and those more coarse and voluptuous exhibitions, the mimes and pantomimes, in which the Empress Theodora is said, in her youth, to have attained such infamous celebrity. How long the written Menander survived the acted Menander it is impossible to determine; the few fragments which survive by no means prove the existence

Aristophanis et Menandri Comparatio,' edit. Reiske, iv. p. 391.

† · ὡς μᾶλλον ἂν οἴνου χωρὶς ἢ Μενάνδρου διακυβερνῆσαι TOV TOTOV.'-Sympos. viii. 3.

One of these, it must be remembered, was a grammarian of the XVth, the other a printer of the XVIth century.

of his works at the time of the writers who cite them. There was a long and constant tradition of these collectors of gnomæ, or striking and proverbial sentences; of grammarians who chronicled remarkable words; of Christian writers who handed down to each other lines of moral beauty in which they were pleased to find the ethics of the heathen in harmony with the tenets of their religion. In fact, of the extant Menander, the larger part, between seven and eight hundred verses, consists of monosticha, single lines, embodying some striking sentiment, or pointing with inimitable and undying expressiveness some eternal moral truth.

Till Meinecke's admirable edition, even these fragments could not be read with perfect satisfaction by the soundest scholar. The book in common use was the Menander and Philemon by Le Clerc, of which Meinecke justly observes, that its only merit was that it called forth the bitter animadversions of Bentley, and opened his inexhaustible store of corrections and amendments.

But it was a wearisome task to read Le Clerc, even with Bentley's brilliant remarks. Every passage provoked a controversy, in which the reader was distracted from the beauty of Menander by the exposure of the ignorance of Le Clerc even as to Greek, and his utter incapacity of comprehending the commonest rules of metre. The best refuge and consolation was in the felicitous transfusion of the

originals into Latin by Hugo Grotius. M. Meinecke afterwards added to his single volume of Menander and Philemon (Berlin, 1823) five volumes of fragments from the other Greek comic poets, with an excellent critical introduction. In 1847 he sent forth what he called a minor edition of the fragments in two volumes, in a handsome type, and with many alterations and improvements which had occurred since his former publication.*

M. Guizot and M. Benoît, whose treatises we commend strongly to the notice of our readers-of those especially in whom the taste and feeling of our old classical studies has not been effaced by the absorbing passions of politics, of religious controversy, and of science-fully acknowledge their debt of gratitude to M. Meinecke. They have largely and wisely availed themselves of his labours, which indeed contain (though the vigilant industry of M. Guizot has

*The student will read with delight and instruction the ingenious Commentaries of M. Bergk on the fragments of the ancient Comedy: Commentationum de reliquiis Comoediae Atticæ antiquæ Libri duo; a Theod. Bergk.' Leipsic, 1838.

that of the birth of Menander. All later writers of the life of Menander have exposed the blunder of the Grammarians, who asserted that it was through the influence of Menander (yet in his swaddling-clothes) that Demosthenes thundered in defence of Diopeithes. Menander inherited none of the military fame or courage of his father. Between the time of his birth and that of his adolescence the fatal revolution had been accomplished, which Diopeithes strove by arms, Demosthenes by his eloquence, to arrest or avert-the collapse of Athens into a subject city of the Macedonian, never again to be more than a subject city. The same year, too, with Menander, was born, in the same city, the city of Socrates, a philosopher, who was to teach the Athenians the lesson of inglorious resignation to their fallen fortunes. The philosopher Epicurus and the poet were not to be, like Socrates and Aristophanes, of opposite factions; they were to conspire-one to lull his countrymen to the peace of pleasure, unrepining, unmurmuring at the loss of freedom; the other to amuse by his exquisite pictures of the vices and follies of that Epicurean state of society, the descendants of those whom Socrates had taught who had burst with laughter at Socrates in his basket among the clouds, spinning, according to the poet's notions, his thin and gauzy web of sophistry. They, the two kindred spirits, were bosom friends, and the philosophy of Menander was that of Epicurus. If the epigram be genuine, and it seems not to be doubted, Menander scrupled not to compare Epicurus with Themistocles-the one as having delivered Athens from the yoke of slavery, the other from that of folly:

Χαῖρε, Νεοκλείδα δίδυμον γένος· ὧν ὁ μὲν ὑμῶν Πατρίδα δουλοσύνας ῥύσαθ', ὁ δ' ἀφροσύνας. Among the follies did the poet reckon the love of freedom? Menander wore the yoke from which Themistocles of old had delivered his country, but which now she bore again, with at least philosophic indifference. He is described by Phædrus as following the multitude who crowded to acknowledge the despotic rule of Demetrius Phalereus. The Latin Fabulist ascribes his unrepining acquiescence, and that of his companions, in the loss of freedom, to their tame and unpatriotic philosophy:

'Quin etiam resides et sequentes otium, Ne defuisse noceat, repunt ultimi.' And Menander was

even distinguished

among these luxurious sycophants of power. He was highly perfumed, his loose robe trailed after him, his step was mincing and languid:

'In quis Menander, nobilis comodus,

Unguento delibutus, vestitu adfluens,
Veniebat gressu delicato et languido.'
Phædr., Fab. vi. 1.

He was distinguished for his personal beauty; of that we have almost a fuller record than of his genius. A. W. Schlegel had already directed attention to the singularly truthful and speaking statue at Rome, now generally admitted to be Menander. M. W. Guizot has prefixed this statue as an engraving to his title-page, and opened his work with a description of it, as the best introduction to the character of the poet, and of his poetry. It is no unfavourable specimen of M. Guizot's style :

'Tous ceux qui se plaisent aux sublimes et charmantes choses de l'esprit choisiraient volontiers ce penseur aimable pour hôte et pour Dieu Lare de leur bibliothèque. Sa tête est un peu penchée, et tournée à demi vers la gauche; ni les rides de la vieillesse ni les angoisses de la douleur ne l'ont contractée ou flétrie; mais l'habitude de la réflexion a imprimé sur ce front large et haut des signes austères; et en même temps la bouche relevée et doucement sevrée par un sourire contenu semble prête à transformer en piquantes épigrammes les pensées qui s'agitent sous ce front sérieux. L'aisance d'un esprit facile, la tranquillité que donne la longue expérience des hommes et de soi-même, la grâce d'une gaîté non forcée d'une moquerie indulgente, respirent dans les mêmes traits. Les prunelles ne sont pas indiquées, mais les yeux sans regard ont une profondeur et une vie qui étonnent. Ils suivent et embrassent une longue rangée de statues, comme si l'homme dont nous avons là l'image voulait encore, maître lui-même, rechercher, sur les marbres ses contemporains, les secrets de l'âme humaine qu'il avait étudiés jadis. Cet homme s'appelait Ménandre.'—Guizot, p. 5.

Contrast, we would add, this statue with the Demosthenes at Paris, meditating, and ready to rise and thunder forth a Philippic, the somewhat depressed, yet firm and undespairing asserter of Athenian independence and freedom.

Such was the person of Menander: the life of the poet was in perfect harmony with the character expressed in the statue, and developed in the plays. It seems to have glided away in pleasure, not unmingled with that grave and almost tender. melancholy which the thoughts of the instability of human things, of inevitable death, forced on the more reflective disciples of Epicurus. By none, as we shall

hereafter attempt to show, are those thoughts more impressively or beautifully expressed than by Menander and by Horace. Once, indeed, the Epicurean poet's life was in peril, but probably from no act of his own. Demetrius Phalereus admired the transcendant comic writer: it was probably solely as favoured by Demetrius Phalereus that, on the conquest of Athens by Demetrius Poliorcetes, Menander was accused by jealous sycophants (we hope not by rival and angry poets), and only spared through the intercession of Telesphorus, the son-in-law of Poliorcetes. After this peril, probably before, Menander was content to enjoy life, and to assist others in enjoying it by his poetry. In his comedies there was nothing to offend, everything to delight, and, in the worldly sense, to instruct the refined and fastidious ears and minds of his countrymen. The most keen and delicate observation of human life, impersonations of characters, the truth of which all might observe, but which were aimed especially at none; plots full of stirring adventure, not improbable in those days of active commerce, and of still more active piracy, and which had some of the interest of modern romance; pure Attic language, which might seem still to assert the intellectual superiority of Athens over her barbarous neighbours and conquerors, and so at once to flatter the national vanity, and charm the most fastidious; versification which might soothe the most sensitive hearing. Menander had even to refine the fine Athenian taste up to his own excellence; he could not altogether disenchant the popular ear from its greater favour to his somewhat less polished and familiar rival, Philemon. He obtained far less frequent prizes: he was crowned but eight times; but, in the consciousness of his own merit, he was superior even to the proverbial irritability of the poet: Do you not blush, Philemon, at your victory over me?' Posterity avenged Menander by owning him as the master and representative of the later comedy. The peace of a sunny, festal life, like Menander's, was not likely to be disturbed by that which so often saddens the days of better and holier men, especially of good Christians, domestic sorrows; even his passions found easy indulgence, and, with his fame and his personal beauty, were not likely, in that state of society, to be thwarted by severe disappointments. He was the successful lover of Glycera, the celebrated Hetaira (we must retain the Greek word, as coarser terms would give a false notion of the position held by this

class of females in Greek society, and of the virtues which they might still display). In that curious and amusing volume, the 'imaginary' Letters of Alciphron, from which Greek society might seem to consist of fishermen and husbandmen, parasites and courtesans, there are two, one from Menander to Glycera, one from Glycera to Menander (translated by M. Guizot). Menander communicates to Glycera the invitation of Ptolemy Lagides (king of Egypt) to his court. But not all the splendour of kingly patronage, nor all the wonders of the Nile, can induce him to abandon Athens and Glycera. The reply, full of pride and tenderness, approaches to the truth of nature, and is at once a good example of the inventive powers of Alciphron, and a favourable view of the attachment which might arise out of that relation. There is another epistle, in which Glycera does not seem to have very full confidence in the constancy of Menander

constancy which might be put to a severe test by his irresistible beauty, manners, and fame.

Menander, with his competitor Philemon, was the creator of the New comedy, though the transition from the more refined Middle comedy was gradual, to us hardly perceptible. This New comedy Menander carried to its highest perfection, in the judgment, at least, of after ages in Greece and in Rome. Still it was, in a great degree, the birth of the times. The old Aristophanic comedy we might almost call part of the democratic constitution of Athens.. The drama was not the amusement only, the idle pastime, of the people: it was a solemn religious ceremony; it was a great political meeting. It was held at three periods in the year, during some of the most holy festivals celebrated in honour of the gods. The theatre was designed to hold the people,' the free people, of all Athens. The expense was borne by those who had the honour to hold the highest magistracies in the state. In order that the vast size of the theatre might be adapted to the sight and hearing of the multitudes entitled to admission, not merely the form of the masks, but contrivances of great ingenuity and of which the secret is wholly lost, were employed to propagate and deepen the tones and inflexions of the human voice, and those tones and inflexions were supported and rendered more distinct by simple musical accompaniments. The masks, if they must have but poorly compensated for the flexible and speaking features of a Siddons or a Pasta, yet maintained a well-known conventional harmony between the coun

tenance and the character, spoke with a different but expressive language. The stature of the actor was aggrandised by the cothurnus or the sock. If tragedy was the graver religious ceremonial, and the tragic theatre the temple of that ceremony, the older comedy had not ceased to be the broader Bacchic, in Roman phrase, the Saturnalian, rite. The Satiric comedy, properly so called-one of these pieces was usually represented with the tragic Trilogy-represented the comic side of the Grecian Pantheon, the gods and heroes in their less dignified and ludicrous attributes. The genuine Comedy in her reckless joyousness, in her absolute abandonment to fun-fun in its wildest, coarsest, at times most obscene-to us, impious--excesses; in that passion for the ridiculous common to the southern races, which we colder and graver northerns can hardly comprehend, but which in Old Italy found vent in the Atellan farces, in the present day still finds vent in the harlequinades, and, with respect be it spoken, in the Christian carnival,Comedy plunged headlong into the political, religious, even philosophical excitement of the day. The theatre became, as it were, a hustings, where the greatest men were exposed, under their proper names, in their actual persons, to the jeers of the mob of citizens; it was a public meeting, in which the most grave questions of foreign policy, of manners, even of religion, were discussed with the boldest satiric licence, where the first men, and opinions the most abstruse and sacred, were brought under the popular judgment. Comedy, as M. W. Guizot well observes, was not a perpetual tribunate, standing up against the highest and most powerful. It was at once the public Press and the caricature, the Times' and Punch,' with no fear of the AttorneyGeneral, with no action for libel; it was secure in popular favour and in established custom against repressive measures of a less legal kind, the revenge of the insulted Cleon, or the indignation of Demos himself, of the impersonated Athenian people, whose weaknesses, follies, vices, it exposed with the same freedom as that of the rival poet or the notorious peculator. This was the licence-the not unsalutary, perhaps useful, licence, which Athens at her height of glory, which Demos, in his conscious strength and self-confidence in the pride of his fleets and subject cities, and of his being the acknowledged and awful head of

There is a very good dissertation on the masks as used in the later comedy, chiefly from Julius Pollux, in the Appendix to M. Benoit's Essay.

i

the Democratic party throughout Greece, might leave to its full freedom. Upon this Pericles, in his unshaken authority over the public mind, might look down in unruffled dignity; this even Cleon, at the height-with due respect to Mr. Grote-of ill-deserved popularity, Nicias and Demosthenes before the fatal Sicilian expedition, might endure; this the war-party, ere the watchfires of the enemy at Decelea shone with their menacing and gloomy glare, might regard as but the harmless ebullition of the popular mind; this, Socrates, in his calm conviction of his own wisdom and his holy purpose of advancing the morals of his countrymen, might himself, as it is reported, witness with serene smile this Eschylus, if alive, in the majesty of his established fame; this even Euripides, when the same theatre rang with shouts of applause, or melted into tears, at his more successful dramas, might bear with equanimity. But when the tide turned against Athens; when her pride was prostrated with failures, when she was saddened to anger, and humiliated by the defection of her allies; when her own sons turned against her; when she was reaping the bitter fruits of her own ingratitude and injustice in the banishment, the ostracism of her noblest sons, then it was that she became peevish, sensitive, winced at every bold word, shrunk from every daring exposure of her weaknesses. Her public men felt that on their tottering eminence the breath of satire might cast them down. They dared not, they would not, be laughed at; every jest became a bitter taunt, every ludicrous allusion a dangerous, it might be fatal, insinuation. It was not that Comedy became more daring and rampant in its licence, less respectful of dignities, more indiscriminate in its censures: but that tyranny was galled, and had neither the conscious strength nor the control over public opinion which would enable it to disdain such assailants, or treat comedy as a safety-valve for compressed popular animosity. We can hardly indeed suppose that comedy could surpass the licence, the permitted and unrebuked licence, of Aristophanes, which he indulged unchecked, till in the 'Plutus' he might seem to check himself. If the law prohibiting the personalities of the comic poets had been passed by Cleon, when he ruled in the popular assembly, to put down the Knights;' if by the war-party, indignant at what they might call the unpatriotic Acharnians and the Peace; or even by the admirers and disciples of Socrates, who might think the 'Clouds' too gross an insult against their