Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/457

435 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 435 abounded in philosophical aphorisms,* not mereiy, as one might at first expect, on notions and principles of morality, but also on metaphysical points — God and the World, body and soul, &c. ; where it is certainly difficult to conceive how Epicharmus interwove these speculative dis- courses into the texture of his comedies. Suffice it to say, we see that Epicharmus found means to connect a representation of the follies and absurdities of the world in which he lived, with pro- found speculations on the nature of things; whence we may infer how entirely different his manner was from that of the Athenian comedy. With this general ethical and philosophical tendency we may easily reconcile the mythical form, which we find in most of the comedies of Epicharmus. t Mythical personages have general and formal features, free from all accidental peculiarities, and may therefore be made the best possible basis of the principles and results, the symptoms and criteria of good and bad characters. Did we but possess the comedy of the Dorians, and those portions of the old and middle comedy (especially the latter) which are so closely connected with it, we should be able to discern clearly what we can now only guess from titles and short fragments, that mythology thus treated was just as fruitful a source of materials for comedy as for the ideal world of the tragic drama. No doubt, the whole system of gods and heroes must have been reduced to a lower sphere of action in order to suit them to the purposes of comedy : the anthropomorphic treatment of the gods must necessarily have arrived at its last stage ; the deities must have been reduced to the level of common life with all its civic and domestic relations, and must have exhibited the lowest and most vulgar inclinations and passions. Thus the insatiable gluttony of Hercules was a subject which Epicharmus painted in vivid colours; j in another place, § a marriage feast among the gods was represented as extravagantly luxurious ; a third, " Hephaestus, or the Revellcrs,"|| exhibited the quarrel of the fire-god with his mother Hera as a mere family brawl, which is terminated very merrily by Bacchus, who, when the incensed son has left Olympus, invites him to a banquet, makes him Sufficiently drunk, and then conducts him hack in triumph to Olympus, in the midst of a tumultuous band of revellers. The most lively view which we still have of this mythological comedy is tins, HI. j n, that one of his successors would one day surpass all other specu- lators by adopting his sayings in another form, without metre. It is perhaps not unlikely that the philosophical anthology which was in vogue under the name of Epicharmus, andwhic 1- Ennius in his Epicharmus Imitated in trochaic tetrameters, was an excerpt from trie comedies of Epicharmus, jisl as the Gnomology, which we have under the name of Thei gnis, was a sel of extracts from his Elegies. f Of 35 titles of his comedies) which have comedown to us, 17 are horrowed from mythological personages. Grysar, tf< Doriensium Comcedia, p. '-'74. i In his Busiris. $ In the Marriage of Hebe, 2 f 2
 * Epicharmus himself says in some beautiful verses quoted by Diogenes Laer?
 * "Hifaitr-o; n Kufuccrrui.