found with Euripides, though he is called the most tragic of poets, and perpetually cited as a great and acknowledged model. But Attic society in the days of Alexander seems to have studied and loved him more than the rest, for in the genteel comedy of Diphilus and Menander, which reflects the tastes of the age, his influence saturated every page. The recognitions in his plays became the fixed models for the new comedies, and his style was so accurately copied, that the stray fragments of Menander can hardly be distinguished from those of Euripides. He was in fact the poetical idol of an age which studied to draw pictures of ordinary human nature, and here found them of inimitable grace and wonderful variety, expressed with the clearness of the purest Attic diction.
109. Thus he passed with the conquests of Alexander into the East, and with the rise of Alexandria into the treasures of the Museum. He was then commented on as one of the three masters of Attic tragedy, and it is to the collection of didascaliæ of Aristophanes (of Byzantium) that we owe the occasional scanty but valuable notices in the Greek arguments and scholia on the date, success, and rivals of the several plays. For the didascaliæ were contemporary records—many on votive tripods—of each performance at Athens, which noted the author, date, companion plays and success in each year's competitions. Had the complete transcript of this Aristophanes' work remained, it would have thrown a flood of light on the external history of the tragedies, and saved our scholars volumes of speculation. But these simple and valuable notices, to which are added a good many grammatical and explanatory notes, are handed down to us together with artistic criticisms, which, if they date from the Alexandrian age,[1] show a complete and ridiculous absence of all æsthetical judgment. Why, they ask, does Electra sit watching at Orestes' feet, when she ought rather to sit at his head? Medea, they say,
- ↑ The worst of these notes may be of Byzantine origin.
