for the multitude as the uproarious farce which formed so large an ingredient of the Old Comedy. So far as we can judge from the mere disjointed fragments which alone have survived, there was very little of broad fun or of comic situations in the plays of Menander. It was in the finer delineation of character, as is admitted by all his critics, that he most excelled. He had studied carefully, and reproduced successfully, the various phases of that human nature which was the Alpha and Omega in his philosophy. The saying of the wise man of old—"Know thyself"—was a very insufficient lesson, he considered, for the dramatist.
"It was not, after all, so wisely said,
That precept—'Know thyself;' I reckon it
Of more advantage to know other men."[1]
How real the characters in his dramas appeared to those who had the best means of judging may be gathered from the terse epigram ascribed to the grammarian Aristophanes, the librarian of Alexandria, who lived about a century after him:—
"O Life, and O Menander! speak, and say
Which copied which? or nature, or the play?"
There certainly does not seem to have been that variety in the characters introduced which we expect and find in the modern drama. But life itself had not then the variety of interest which it has now: and the sameness of type which we observe in the persons of the drama probably existed also in society. It must be re-
- ↑ Meineke, Menand. Rel., 83.
