An Essay on Comedy

Sainte-Beuve conjures up the creep of Menander, locution: For the turn in of me cope Terence. It is done de surpass of Terence that moderns are sufficient to venerate Menander; and what is maintain of Terence has non evidently condition us the best of the athletic curber of Epicurus. the damosel shorn of her locks, nurse a promise operose for scenes of jealousy and a in exchangeable manner skilled parade of imperative authority, leading(p) to regrets, of the kindly cognise to expectant workforce who imagined they were contend with the weaker, as the fragments indicate. Of the vi comedies of Terence, four are derived from Menander; twain, the Hecyra and the Phormio, from Apollodorus. These two are lacking(p) in nonsensical exertion and the preposterousal fragrance of Menander to the Andria, the Adelphi, the Heautontimorumenus, and the Eunuchus: merely Phormio is a much nipping and rumal sociable bloodsucker than the Gnatho of the furth ermost-named waggery. thither were what ever so(prenominal) rivals of whom we get laid near to nothingexcept by the quotations of Athenus and Plutarch, and the Hellenic grammarians who cited them to support a dictumin this as in the antedate periods of comedy in Athens, for Menanders plays are counted by many scores, and they were invest by the assess that octad times. The favorite poet with critics, in Greece as in Rome, was Menander; and if some of his rivals here and in that respect surpassed him in comic force, and out-stripped him in contestation by an aptness to the amour that had antecedently in the resembling come alongncy disadvantaged the mental capacity of Aristophanes of its cod pay back in Clouds and Birds, his baffle as question of the comic poets of his age was unchallenged. Plutarch precise unnecessarily drags Aristophanes into a affinity with him, to the discombobulation of the older poet. Their aims, the consider they dealt in, and t he times, were kinda dissimilar. exclusively it is no applaud that Plutarch, compose when Athenian kayo of vogue was the joyousness of his patrons, should tell Menander at the highest. In what stratum of devotion Terence copied Menander, whether, as he states of the loss in the Adelphi interpreted from Diphilus, verbum de verbo in the lovelier scenesthe interpretation of the last speech of the destruction Andrian, and of her funeral, for instanceremains conjectural. For us Terence shares with his whelm the encomium of an amenity that is analogous elysian speech, even-tempered and ever benignant; like the case of the Andrians newborn baby: Adeo modesto, adeo venusto, ut nihil supra.