tion of patron and client, which meets us everywhere in the Roman city life of those days—when the great man was surrounded with his crowds of hangers-on, all more or less dependent upon and obsequious to him, and often eating at his table—was sure to breed in plenty that kind of human fungus.
Among the remaining characters common to this Menandrian Comedy we meet with the waiting-maid, more or less pert and forward—who, although a slave, seems to have had considerable liberty of tongue, and who maintains her ground upon the modern stage with little more change in the type than has followed necessarily with the changes of society. There is, again, the family nurse, garrulous but faithful; and sometimes we have another of the household in the person of the family cook. Lastly, there is the hateful slave-merchant, the most repulsive character in the Greek and Roman drama, and upon whose ways and doings there is no need for us here to dwell.
The philosophy of Menander has been spoken of as distinctly of an Epicurean character, and his morality is certainly no whit higher than that of his age and times. Yet fragments of his have escaped the general wreck, which have in them a grave melancholy not usually associated in our ideas with the teaching of that school, and which have led a modern scholar, than whom no one understood more thoroughly the spirit of Greek literature, to remark that Menander after all seems to have been "more adapted to instruct than to entertain."[1] Such a fragment is the following:—
