Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/467

445 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 445 ■which Menander made tlic leading object in Ins compositions: for, while the old comedy set its forms in motion in a very free and un- constrained manner, according as the developement of the fundamental thought required, the new comedy was subject to the laws of probability as established by the progress of ordinary life, and had to invent a story in which all the views of the persons and all the circumstances of their actions resulted from the characters, manners, and relations of the age. The stretch of attention on the part of the spectator which Aristophanes produced by the continued progression in the de- velopement of the comic ideas of his play was effected in the new comedy by the confusion and solution of outward difficulties in the circum- stances represented, and by the personal interest felt for the particular characters by the spectators, — an interest closely connected with the illusion of reality. In this the attentive reader of these observations will readily have perceived how comedy, thus conducted by Menander and Philemon, only completed what Euripides had begun on the tragic stage a hundred years before their time. Euripides, too, deprived his characters of that ideal grandeur which had been most conspicuous in the creations of iEschylus, and gave them more of human weakness, and therefore of apparent individuality. Euripides, too, abandoned the foundation of national principles in ethics and religion on which the old popular morality of the Greeks had been built up, and subjected all relations to a dialectical, and sometimes sophistical mode of reasoning, which very soon led to the lax morality and common sense doctrines which pre- vailed in the new comedy. Euripides and Menander consecpiently agree so well in their reasonings and sentences, that in their fragments it would be easy to confuse one with the other; and thus tragedy and comedy, these two forms of the drama which started from such different beginnings, here meet as it were in one point.* The form of the diction also contri- buted a great deal to this : for as Euripides lowered the poetic tone of tragedy to the ordinary language of polished society, in the same way corned}', and indeed even the middle,! but still more the new, re- linquished, on the one hand, the high poetic tone which Aristophanes had aimed at, especially in his choral songs, and, on the other hand, the spirit of caricature and burlcscpie which is essentially connected with the portraiture of his characters : the tone of polished conversa- tion! predominates in all the pieces of the new comedy ; and in this Menander gave a greater freedom and liveliness to the recitations of his once destroy himself, in order to see Euripides in the other world, provided he could convince himself that departed spirits preserved their life and understanding. See Meineke, Men. et Pinion, lie/., p. 410. According to Anonymua de Comcedia, p. xxviii. J This is particularly mentioned by Plutarch (Aristoph. ct Menandri compar., c. 2.)
 * Philemon was so warm an admirer of Euripides, that ho declared lie would at