Page:Plautus and Terence.djvu/40

28 of the worshipper of the gods, which is a close parallel to the Christian teaching:—

Another father of the Church has cited a terse apophthegm, which he attributes to Menander, as an argument to show the folly of idolatry:—

We owe the loss of Menander's plays most probably to the fierce crusade made by the authorities of the early Church against this kind of heathen literature. Yet it is plain that this feeling was not shared by the ecclesiastical writers who have been quoted; and it is singular that we have one sentence of his embalmed in the writings of a still higher authority—St Paul:

A manuscript of some at least of these comedies was said to have been long preserved in the library of the Patriarch at Constantinople, but it seems to have escaped the search of modern scholars, and has probably in some way disappeared.

How great the loss has been to the literary world cannot be measured, though something may be guessed. It may be said of him as was said of our own Jeremy Taylor—"His very dust is gold." The number of single verses and distiches caught up from his plays which passed into household proverbs show how widely his writings must have leavened the literary