Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/97

 ORIGIN OF COMEDY. 79 play. Nor will the proper interpretation of tlie law Trepl rod firj ovo/jLacrrl KcofioiBelv^ enable us to distinguish between the comedians as belonging to one class or the other. As to the comedies them- selves, however, we may safely conclude on the authority of Plato- nius, that the Middle Comedy was a form of the old, but differed from it in three particulars ; it had no chorus, and therefore no parabasis, — this deviation was occasioned by the inability of the impoverished state to furnish the comic poets with choragi : living characters were not introduced on the stage, — this was owing to the want of energy produced by the subversion of the democratic empire : as a consequence of both these circumstances, the objects of its ridicule were general rather than personal, and literary rather than political. If, therefore, we were called upon to give to the Old and Middle Comedy their distinctive appellations, we should call one Caricature, and the other Criticism; and if we wished to illus- trate the difference by modern instances, we should compare the for- mer to the Lampoon, the latter to the Review. The period to which the writers of the Middle Comedy belonged, may be defined generally as that included between the termination of the Peloponnesian war and the overthrow of Athenian freedom by Philip of Macedon, from B.C. 404 to B.C. 340. The numerous comedies which appeared in this interval, especially those belonging to the latter half of the period, were chiefly occupied in holding up to light and not ill- natured ridicule, the literary and social peculiarities of the day. The writers seized on what was ludicrous in the contemporary systems of philosophy. They parodied and travestied not only the language but sometimes even the plots of the most celebrated tragedies and epic poems. And, in the same spirit, they not un- frequently took their subjects directly from the old mythology. In their satires on society they attacked rather classes of men, than prominent individuals, of the class. Courtesans, parasites, and ^ Mr. Clinton, in the Introduction to the second volume of his Fasti Ilellenici (pp. xxxvi, &c.) has shown that the generally received idea, which would distinguish the Middle from the Old Comedy by its abstinence from personal Scatire, is completely at variance with the fragments still extant; and that the celebrated law — tov firj duofiaarl Kw/xipSelv rivd — simply forbade the introduction of any individual on the stage by name as one of the dramatis personce. This prohibition, too, might be evaded by suppressing the name and identifying the individual by means of the mask, the dress, and external appearance alone. " This law, then, when limited to its proper sense, is by no means inconsistent with a great degree of comic liberty, or with those animad- versions upon eminent names with which we find the comic poets actually to abound" {Fast. Hell. p. xlii). The date of the law is uncertain; probably about B.C. 404, during the government of the Thirty.