Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/285

 GREEK PLAYS IN GENERAL. 259 In the Old Comedy, as Pollux tells us^, the mask was for the most part a caricature of the person represented ; but in the New Comedy there was a regular mask for every conventional charac- ter, the old man in particular having no less than ten types of countenance^. There is a superabundance of monuments repre- senting the scenes of the New Comedy. Indeed, there is an illus- trated manuscript of Terence 3, which is probably at least as old as the sixth century, and may have been copied from one still more ancient, and statues, reliefs, and paintings exhibit the comic actors of the later stage in every character and in all varieties of posture. In a marble bas relief, supposed to represent the second scene of the fifth act of Terence's Andria^, an angry master, who is about to commit his slave to the tender mercies of a lorarius, is pacified by a friend of similar age. The figure of the supposed Simo is given in the annexed illustratiou. Fig. 23. The slave is always distinguished by a singular deformity in the mouth. The sitting figure, which is here subjoined, is fre- quently repeated in ancient statues^, and exhibits the peculiarity of the slave's mask, to which we refer. From the ring on the finger of one of the repetitions of this comic character, and from 1 IV. § 143: rd hk KWjXLKa vpocrwira, ra fieu rrjs wakaias KiOjXi^Uas Cos to ttoXi) Toh irpoadoTTois (2v eKCJfJupSouv dTret/cdfero -q iirl to yekoLOTepov ^axflP-o-Ti-^^TO. 2 Pollux, IV. §§ 143 sqq. 2 See Wieseler, Theatergeb. pp. 63 sqq. Taf. X. Nos 2 — 7, from a MS. in the Vatican at Rome ; No. 8, from a MS. in the Ambrosian Library at Milan. 4 Mm. Borh. Vol. iv. T. xxiv. ; Wieseler, Taf. xi. No. i. 5 See Wieseler, Theaterg. Taf. xi. Nos. 8, 9, 10, 11, and Taf. xii. No. 5. The figure (24) given in the following page is in the British Museum, and is engraved in Anc. Marh. in the Br. Mus. Part x. PI. XLiii. 17—2