Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/389

 COMKIIY. 373 wards polished as well as idealized in the Bucolic poetry of The okritus. 1 That which is commonly termed the Doric comedy was in great part at least, the Sikel comedy taken up by Dorian com- posers, the Doric race and dialect being decidedly predominant in Sicily : the manners thus dramatized belonged to that coarser vein of humor which the Doric Greeks of the town had in com- mon with the semi-Hellenized Sikels of the circumjacent villages. Moreover, it seems probable that this rustic population enabled the despots of the Greco-Sicilian towns to form easily and cheap- ly those bodies of mercenary troops, by whom their power was sustained,- and whose presence rendered the continuance of pop- ular government, even supposing it begun, all but impossible. It was the destiny of most of the Grecian colonial establish ments to perish by the growth and aggression of those inland powers upon whose coast they were planted, powers which gradually acquired, from the vicinity of the Greeks, a military and political organization, and a power of concentrated action, such as they had not originally possessed. But in Sicily, the Sikels were not numerous enough even to maintain permanently their own nationality, and were ultimately penetrated on all sides by Hellenic ascendency and manners. We shall, nevertheless, come 1 Timokreon, Fragment. 5 ap. Ahrens, De Dialecto Dorica, p. 478, 2i/C/.i>f o//i/idf uvr/p HOTI TUI> //arcp' l^a. Benihardy, Grundriss der Geschichte der Griech. Litteratur, vol. ii. ch. 120, sects. 2-5; Grysar, De Doricnsium Comocdia, Cologne, 1828, ch. i, pp. 41, 55, 57, 210; Boeckh, De Graecae Tragoed. Princip. p. 52; Aristot. ap. Athena;, xi, 505. The 6rra/3of seems to hare been a native Sikel fashion, borrowed by the Greeks (Athenaeus, xv, pp. 666-668). The Sicilian fiovicofaaaudf was a fashion among the Sicilian herdsmen earlier than Epicharmus. who noticed the alleged inventor of it, Diomus. the /3ot'Ko2.of Zt/cEP.tunpf (Athcnse. xiv, p. 619). The rustic manners and speech represented in the Sicilian comedy are contrasted with the town manners and speech of the Attic comedy, by Plautns, Persa?. Act iii Sc. 1, v, 31: " Librorum eccillum habeo plenum soracum. Dabuntnr dotis tibi inde sexcenti logi. Atque Attici omnes, nullum Siculum accepcris.'' Compare the beginning of the prologue to the Menaechmi of Plautns. The comic /if'tfof began at Syracuse with Epicharmus and Phormu (Aristot. Poet, v 5). 'Zenobius, Proverb, v, 84, Swce/.dc arpaTtuTt;(.