Page:Plautus and Terence.djvu/110

98 of 'The Maid of Andros' when the Ædile motioned him to a seat by his own side, and there the reading was completed.

The six comedies which follow are probably all that their author ever put upon the stage. In the midst of his dramatic career, he left Rome in order to travel in Greece, and is said during his tour to have employed himself in the translation of upwards of a hundred of Menander's comedies. He seems never to have returned, and tradition says that he was lost at sea on his voyage homeward, and that his precious manuscripts perished with him. Another story is that he himself escaped from the wreck, but died of grief for the loss of his literary treasures.

His plays have far more elegance, but less action, than those of Plautus. He is perhaps more adapted for the library, and Plautus for the stage. Very much of the fun of the latter is broad farce, while Terence seldom descends below parlour comedy. But the two writers had moved in very different circles: Plautus had been familiar with life in the Suburra—the St Giles's of Rome—while Terence had mixed in the society of the Palatine. Their tastes had thus been formed in very different schools. It is probable that Terence gives us a better notion of what Menander was than either Plautus or Cæcilius. A criticism of Cæsar has been already quoted, in which he calls Terence a "half-Menander." In the same lines he speaks of his "pure diction" and "smoothness," and regrets his deficiency in that lively humour ("vis comica") which Menander seems to have succeeded in combining with