Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/450

428 428 HISTORY OF THE offensive, but at the same time less genial nature of the language. The alteration, however, does not run through the play so as to bring the new species of comedy before us in its complete form ; here and there we feci the breath of the old comedy around us, and we cannot avoid the melancholy conviction that the genial comedian has survived the best days of his art, and has therefore become insecure and unequal in his application of it. CHAPTER XXIX. § 1. Characteristics of Cratinus. § 2. Eupolis. § 3. Peculiar tendencies of Crates ; his connexion with Sicilian comedy. <§ 4. Sicilian comedy originates in the Doric farces of Megara. §5. Events in the life of Epicharmus ; general tendency and nature of his comedy. § G. The middle Attic comedy; poets of this class akin to those of the Sicilian comedy in many of their pieces. § 7. Poets of the new comedy the immediate successors of those of the middle comedy. How the new comedy becomes naturalized at Rome. § 8. Public morality at Athens at the time of the new comedy. § 9. Character of the new comedy in connexion therewith. § 1. Cratinus and Eupolis, Pherecrates and Hermippus, Telecleides and Plato, and several of those who competed Avith them for the prize of comedy, are known to us from the names of a number of their pieces which have come down to our time, and also from the short quotations from their plays by subsequent authors ; these furnish us with abundant materials for an inquiry into the details of Athenian life, public and private, but are of little use for a description like the present, which is based on the contents of individual works and on the characteristics of the different poets. Of Cratinus, in particular, we learn more from the short but preg- nant notices of him by Aristophanes, than from the very mutilated fragments of his works. It is clear that he was well fitted by natui-c for the wild and merry dances of the Bacchic Comus. The spirit of comedy spoke out as clearly and as powerfully in him as that of tragedy did in iEschylus. He gave himself up with all the might of his genius to the fantastic humour of this amusement ; and the scattered sparks of his wit proceeded from a soul imbued with the magnanimous honesty of the older Athenians. His personal attacks were free from all fear or regard to the consequences. As opposed to Cratinus, Aristophanes appeared as a well educated man, skilled and apt in speech, and not untinged with that very sophistic training of Euripides, against which he so systematically inveighed ; and thus we find it asked in a fragment