Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/96

 78 CLASSIFICATION OF GREEK PLAYS. be regarded as an open question ; "but there can be no doubt that the manner and the object of the cure of Meudon were identical with those of the great comedian of Athens ; and that the name of Pantagruelist, invented by the one, accurately describes the lead- ing characteristics of his main prototype. The chief difference between the Old Comedy of Athens, as represented by Aristophanes, and the modern manifestations of the same riotous drollery, as a cover for some serious purpose, which it might be premature, un- safe, or generally inexpedient to disclose, must be sought in the peculiar relations which subsisted between the old comedian and his democratic audience during the short period of the Old Comedy's highest perfection, namely, the interval between the commencement of the Peloponnesian war and the Sicilian expedition, when the irritable Demos was so conscious of his power and was so exhila- rated by his good fortune that, like the kings of the middle ages, he was willing to tolerate any jokes at his own expense, if the satirist would only pay him tlie compliment of adopting the thin veil of caricature, and pretend to put forward as an outpouring of privileged folly what he really meant to be taken as the most serious remonstrance or the most biting reproof It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to draw a clearly defined line of demarcation between the latest writers of the Old and the earliest writers of the Middle Comedy. We cannot say of them that this author Avas on old comedian ; that a middle comedian : they may have been both, as Aristophanes certainly was, if the criterion was the absence or presence of a Parahasis'^, or speech of the chorus in which the audience are addressed in the name of the poet, and without, in many cases, any reference to the subject of the from Varro {L. L. v. 9, p. 4, Miiller), wlio is speaking of Aristophanes, the grammarian of Byzantium, and of the grammatical studies of the Stoics ; but Rabelais, like his commentators, may have misunderstood Varro. 1 Aristophanes openly avows this mixture of the serious and the ridiculous in his later comedies, when he no longer practised it with the same objects. Ran. 391 : kol TToWci ixh yeXoTd fj.' elTrelv ttoXXo, 5e cr7roi'5a?a. Eccles. 1200; (XfiLKpov 5' viroO^adac Toh KpcTOLffL ^ouXo/xar rots ao(poh iih tCjv ao(pQv ixeixv7)[iivovs Kpipeiv ifjt,^' roh yeXQat S' Tjd^cos 5ia Tov yeXcora KplveLv epii. 2 Ta ras xapajSdaei^ ovk ^x^^'''^ ididdxdv e^ovaias dvo rod drip,ov p.e6t.(yTaixevr)s /cat dXiyapxl-cis Kparovar^s. Platonius. With regard to the attempt of Meineke {Quccsiion. Scenicce, Sp. ill. p. 50) to prove that Antiphanes was a new comic poet, because he mentioned the p.aTTvr) (Athen. XIV, p. 662 f), we may remark, that the word cannot be used as a criterion to enable us to distinguish between two schools of comedians, for it is mentioned by Nicostratus, the son of Aristophanes (see Clinton in Phil. Mus. I, p. 560), and the dainty was not unknown to Aristophanes himself, who uses the word /iarrvoAoixos {Nuh. 451).