household."[1] It is not surprising that comedy turned away from individuals of such limited freedom to another class of Attic women whose intellectual culture was purchased at the expense of their morals—the hetæræ, or courtesans. Among the characteristics of the New Comedy Mr. Mahaffy places "the increased prominence of courtesan life;" and among the stock characters the designing courtesan now occupies the foremost place. As an evidence of this prominence, it may be observed that out of some forty female characters in the extant plays of Plautus (whose drama is a close imitation of the New Comedy) about one-half are courtesans or lenæ, or their maids; while the Captivi, notable as the most moral play of Plautus, "ad pudicos mores facta," contains no female characters at all—a fact which would seem to imply that their presence was incompatible with a drama "ubi boni meliores fiant," the quality claimed for the Captivi by its Caterva.
§ 64. The main materials of this later Athenian comedy were supplied by domestic life, though philosophers of the day, such as Epicurus and Zeno, or even occasionally political personages, even Alexander himself, might be attacked. In truth, the individualism of Attic life could not have tolerated any drama but that of trivial personalities. Whether we accept the extant Characters of Theophrastus as really his or not, we have abundant evidences in the ethical and political theories of Plato and Aristotle to show that analysis of individual character had become from the conditions of Attic society a common subject of Attic thought. It was individualism, though in the very different social life of Elizabethan England, that produced such works as
- ↑ Mahaffy, Hist. Class. Gk. Lit., vol. ii. p. 415. See Aristotle, Nat. Hist., bk. ix. ch. 1.
