LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 437 life, which prevails much more uniformly in their plays than in those of Aristophanes, with the exception of some few passages, where it is interrupted by parodies of epic and tragic poetry.* These comedians were not altogether without a basis of personal satire ; but this was no longer directed against influential men, the rulers of the people ; f or, if it touched them at all, it was not on account of their political character, or of any principles approved by the bulk of the people. On the contrary, the middle comedy cultivated a narrower field of its own, — the department of literary rivalship. The poems of the middle comedy were rich in ridicule of the Platonic Academy, of the newly revived sect of the Pythagoreans, of the orators and rhetoricians of tiie day, and of the tragic and epic poets : they sometimes even took a retro- spective view, and subjected to their criticism anything which they thought weak or imperfect in the poems of Homer. This criticism was totally different from that directed by Aristophanes against Socrates, which was founded exclusively upon moral and practical views ; the judgments of the middle comedy considered everything in a literary point of view, and, if we may reason from individual instances, were directed solely against the character of the writings of the persons criticized. In the transition from the old to the middle comedy we may discern at once the great revolution which had taken place in the domestic history of Athens, when the Athenians, from a people of politicians, be- came a nation of literary men ; when, instead of pronouncing judgment upon the general politics of Greece, and the law-suits of their allies, they judged only of the genuineness of the Attic style and of good taste in oratory ; when it was no longer the opposition of the political ideas of Themistocles and Ciinon, but the contests of opposing schools of philo- sophers and rhetoricians, which set all heads in motion. This great change was not fully accomplished till the time of Alexander's successors ; but the middle comedy stands as a guide-post, clearly pointing out the way to this consummation. The frequency of mythical subjects in the comedies of this class has the same grounds as in the Sicilian comedy; for the object in both was to clothe general delineations of character in a mythical form. Further than this, we must admit that our conceptions of the middle comedy are somewhat vacillating and uncertain ; this arises from the constitution of the middle comedy itself, which is rather a transition fact that Pollux (Onum. IV., § 140, 14X, loO) names the Sicilian parasite and the scullion Meeson among the masks of the new comedy, (according to the restoration by Meineke, Hist. Vrit. Com. Grcec., p. 664, comp. above, § 4.)
- Hence we see why the Scholiast, in the Plutus, 51o, recognizes the character
of the middle comedy in the epic tone of the passage. f On the contrary, these comedians considered ludicrous representations of foreign rulers as quite allowable ; thus the Dionysius of Eubulus was directed against the Sicilian tyrants, and the Dionysalexandrus of the younger Cratinus against Alexander of Pherffi. Similarly, in later times, Menander satirized Dio- nysius, tyrant of Heraclea, and Philemon king Magas of Cyrene. | Meineke ( Hist. Grit, Com. Cfec, p. '^83, foil.) gives a long list of such mythical comedies.
