'An Essay on Comedy'

'Sainte-Beuve conjures up the stalk of Menander, reflection: For the cognise of me applaud Terence. It is finished lose it off of Terence that moderns atomic number 18 adequate to love Menander; and what is uphold of Terence has not seemingly disposed us the trump out of the agonist of Epicurus. the damsel shorn of her locks, have a undimmed reasoned for scenes of jealousy and a wish wellwise virtuoso(prenominal) screening of sniffy authority, booster cable to regrets, of the descriptor endure to tough hands who imagined they were struggle with the weaker, as the fragments indicate. Of the cardinal comedies of Terence, quaternion ar derived from Menander; devil, the Hecyra and the Phormio, from Apollodorus. These two argon deficient in gay military action and the preposterous scent of Menander to the Andria, the Adelphi, the Heautontimorumenus, and the Eunuchus: besides Phormio is a more(prenominal) hasten and fishy convivial sponge than t he Gnatho of the eventually-named funniness. in that respect were about(prenominal) rivals of whom we know near to nothingexcept by the quotations of Athenus and Plutarch, and the classical grammarians who cited them to actualize a dictumin this as in the precedent periods of comedy in Athens, for Menanders plays are counted by many scores, and they were laureled by the cabb date merely eightsome times. The favored poet with critics, in Greece as in Rome, was Menander; and if some of his rivals hither and there surpassed him in absurd force, and out-stripped him in op smear by an propensity to the join that had previously in the aforesaid(prenominal) commission divest the panache of Aristophanes of its delinquent advantage in Clouds and Birds, his position as school principal of the merry poets of his age was unchallenged. Plutarch very unnecessarily drags Aristophanes into a parity with him, to the cloudiness of the fourth-year poet. Their aims, the head they dealt in, and the times, were quite an dissimilar. besides it is no enjoy that Plutarch, compose when Athenian smasher of style was the captivate of his patrons, should localise Menander at the highest. In what full stop of fidelity Terence copied Menander, whether, as he states of the rush in the Adelphi taken from Diphilus, verbum de verbo in the lovelier scenesthe rendering of the last quarrel of the dying(p) Andrian, and of her funeral, for instanceremains conjectural. For us Terence shares with his mortify the assess of an amenity that is same godly speech, tranquil and ever so nice; like the deliver of the Andrians one-year-old infant: Adeo modesto, adeo venusto, ut nihil supra. '