Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/424

394 work and that of other writers in this style from the plays of Plautus and Terence, which were translated, or at any rate adapted, from them. They give a picture of the domestic life in Greece as it was when politics were no longer of absorbing interest. The plots generally turn on the love adventures of young men, assisted by cunning or faithful slaves, frowned upon or pardoned by severe or indulgent fathers. In most there are seen those blots on Greek life—the habit of exposing infants, the trade of the slave-dealer in young girls, and the severities to which slaves themselves were exposed. The only outlet for the energies of active young men seems to be now the career of a mercenary soldier in the service of some of the successors of Alexander the Great. The picture of social and domestic life is not otherwise unkindly, and though there are the conventional gibes at women and marriage, there is a manifest appreciation of family confidence and purity. The parasite, or needy hanger-on, is an almost invariable feature in these plays, performing a part something between those of the chorus and the “messengers” in the old plays. He, too, is perhaps rather a stage convention than a representative of anything real. Along with these plays of the “New Comedy” there existed a sort of dramatic dialogue or “mime.” These mimes seem to have belonged principally to outlying parts of Hellas. Those of Herondas (discovered in 1890) came from the cities on the Pontus, perhaps Cyzicus, and are written in the dialect used in those parts. They do not give a very agreeable picture of Greek life.