PLAUTUS AND TERENCE.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY—THE ANCIENT COMIC DRAMA.
The Comedies of Plautus and Terence are all that remains to us of the Roman Comic Drama. It is impossible to deal with the works of these writers, even in so slight a sketch as is contemplated in this volume, without some previous reference to the Greek originals from which they drew. For the Roman drama was, more than any other branch of Roman literature, an inheritance from Greece; one of those notes of intellectual sovereignty which that marvellous people impressed upon their conquerors. The plays which, during five hundred years, from the days of the Scipios to those of Diocletian, amused a Roman audience, had as little claim to be regarded as national productions as the last happy "adaptation" from the French which enjoys its brief run at an English theatre.
But when we speak of Greek Comedy in its relation to the Roman Drama, we must not form our idea of Comedy from the plays of Aristophanes. It so happens that he stands before us moderns as the sole surviving representative, in anything like discernible shape, of the comic drama at Athens. But his brilliant burlesques, with their keen political satire, their wealth of allusion, their mad extravagance of wit pushed even to buffoonery, have not much more in common with the plays of Plautus and Terence than with our modern parlour comedy as we have it from Mr Robertson or Mr Byron.
It has been said, when we parted from Aristophanes in a former volume of this series, that the glories of the old Athenian comedy had departed even before the great master in that school had put his last piece upon the stage. The long War was over. The great game of political life no longer presented the same intense excitement for the players. Men's lives and thoughts had begun to run in a narrower channel. As a political engine, there was no longer scope or occasion for the comic drama. And again, it was no longer easy to provide that costly and elaborate spectacle,—the numerous Chorus, highly trained and magnificently costumed, the machinery, the decorations, and the music,—which had delighted the eyes of Athenian playgoers none the less because their intellect was keen enough to appreciate every witticism of the dialogue. It must be remembered that the expense of mounting a new play—and this must always have been considerable where the theatres were on such a vast scale—was not a matter of speculation for author or manager, as with us, but a public charge undertaken in turn by the richer citizens; and in which those who sought popularity, in order to advance their own political claims, vied with each other in the liberality of their expenditure. But at the close of the Peloponnesian War, many a noble family found itself impoverished by the long and terrible struggle, and the competition for public office had probably lost much of its charm. The stage followed the temper of the nation: it became less violently political, less extravagant and more sedate. Shall one venture to say that, like the nation, it lost something of its spirit? There was method, we must remember, in the mad licence of Aristophanes. Bitter as he was against his political opponents, it was an honest bitterness, and Cleon was his enemy because he believed him to be the enemy of the state. Socrates and Euripides were caricatured in the most unsparing fashion, for the amusement of the audience, and it was convenient for a professional jester to have two such well-known characters for his subject; but he had always the apology that he really believed the teaching both of the philosopher and of the tragedian to have an evil influence upon public morality. There was a certain earnestness of purpose which gave respectability to the Aristophanic comedy in spite of its notorious offences against decency and good manners.
The new style of Comedy, which was the original of that of Plautus and Terence, and which developed in later times into what we call Comedy now, did not perhaps fully establish itself at Athens until nearly half a century after the death of Aristophanes. But the germ of it may be found in the later tragedies of Euripides. His heroes, and even his gods, are as unlike as possible to the stately figures who move in the dramas of Æschylus. He may call them by what names he pleases, but they are the personages of ordinary life. His drunken Hercules, in his beautiful drama (tragedy it can hardly be called) 'Alcestis,' is as really comic as any character in Menander's plays. His unsparing satirist Aristophanes, in his 'Frogs,' when he introduces Æschylus and Euripides pleading before Bacchus their respective claims to the chair of tragedy, makes it one of the charges against the latter that he had lowered the whole tone of tragedy: that whereas Æschylus had left the ideal men of the drama "grand figures, four cubits high," his rival had reduced them to the petty level of everyday life—poor mean gossips of the market-place.[1] He allows Euripides indeed to plead in his defence that while the elder tragedian had given the audience nothing but high-flown sentiment and pompous language which was quite above their comprehension, he had brought before them subjects of common household interest which all could understand and sympathise with. Both accusation and defence were true. Euripides had violated the severe simplicity of classic tragedy: but he had founded the domestic drama.
The oligarchy of Rome would scarcely have permitted to the writers for the stage the licence of personal satire which the Athenian democracy not only bore with, but encouraged and delighted in. The risk which Aristophanes ran from the political partisans of Cleon would have been as nothing, compared with the perils of the comic dramatist who should have presumed to take the same liberty with any members of the "old great houses" of Rome. There had been at least one example of this in the fate of the poet Nævius. We know very little, unfortunately, of what his dramas may have been like, for in his case we have remaining to us only the merest fragments. But he seems to have made an attempt to naturalise at Rome the old Aristophanic style of comedy. A plebeian by birth, and probably a democratic reformer in politics, he had ventured upon some caricature of, or satire upon, the members of the great family who bore the name of Metellus, and who, as he complained, were always holding high office, fit or unfit. "It is fatality, not merit," he said, in a verse which has been preserved, "that has made the Metelli always consuls of Rome." The family or their friends retorted in a song which they chanted in the streets, the burden of which was, in effect, that "Nævius would find the Metelli a fatality to him." They very soon got him imprisoned, under the stringent libel laws of Rome: and,—since that was not enough to break his spirit—for he is said, after his release, to have written comedies which were equally distasteful in high quarters,—they succeeded at last in driving him into banishment. We hear of no more ambition on the part of Roman dramatists to assume the mantle of Aristophanes. They were content to be disciples in the later school of Menander, and to take as the subject of comedy those general types of human nature under which no individual, high or low, was obliged to think that his own private weaknesses were attacked.
- ↑ Frogs, 953, 910.