Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/219

 WHO SUCCEEDED ARISTOPHANES. 201 the prize eight times: 115 titles of Comedies ascribed to him have come down to us ; it is not certain, however, that all these are correctly attributed to him^ He died at Athens in the year 291 B. C.2 According to one account, he was drowned while bathing in the harbour of the Peir^eus^. It appears from the encomiums which are heaped upon him*, that he was by far the best writer of the Comedy of Manners among the Greeks. We have a few specimens of the ingenuity of his plots in some of the plays of Terence, whom Julius Caesar used to call a demi-Menander^. He was an imitator of Euripides^, and we may infer from what Quinti- lian says of him^, that his Comedies differed from the Tragi-comedies of that poet only in the absence of mythical subjects and a chorus. Like Euripides, he was a good rhetorician, and Quintilian is in- clined to attribute to him some orations published in the name of Charisius^. The every-day life of his countrymen, and manners and characters of ordinary occurrence, were the objects of his imi- tation 9. His plots, though skilfully contrived, are somewhat mono- tonous ; there are few of his Comedies which do not bring on the stage a harsh father, a profligate son, and a roguish slave i^. In his ' Fabricius, It. pp, 460, 468, Harles. 2 Clinton, F. H. ii. p. 181. 3 A line in the Ihls attributed to Ovid, is supposed by some to allude to this (591): Comicus ut mediis periit dum nabat in undis. 4 Quintil. X. I, 69; Plutarch, Tom. IX. pp. 387 sqq. Eeiske; and Dio Chrysost. XVIII. p. 255. 5 Donatus, V'd. Terentii. 6 See the passages compared by Meineke, Fragm. Com. Gr. Vol. IV. pp. 705 foil. It is interesting to know that it is still doubtful whether the Senarius quoted by St. Paul in I Corinth, xv. 33, was not borrowed by Menander, in his TJials, from some lost play of Euripides, It is quoted in Latin by TertuUian, ad Uxor. I. 8. '' X. I, 69. ^ X. I, 70. ^ Aristoph. Byz. ap. Schol. Hermogenls, p. 38 : ''fi Mhavdpe Kal (Sie, Uorepos ap' vfiQv irbrepov i/j-lfxi^a-aTo; Manilius, v. 472 : Ardentes juvenes, raptasque in amore puellas, Elusosque senes, agilesque per omnia servos, Quis in cuncta suam produxit saecula vitam Doctor in urbe sua linguae sub flore Menander, Qui vitae ostendit vitam, chartisque sacravit. ^* Dum fallax servus, durus pater, improba laena, Vivent, dum meretrix blanda, Menandrus erit, Ovid, I. Amorum, XV. 18.