Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/99

 ORIGIN OF COMEDY. 81 New Comedy. The other characters, the greedy parasite, the clever and unprincipled slave, and the scheming or tyrannical courtesan, may have appeared in the Middle Comedy ; but they are the new- comedian's indispensable staff. And now for the first time the element of love becomes the main ingredient in dramatic poetry The object of the young man's passion is not the free-born Athenian maiden, but some accomplished eralpa, or an innocent girl, who is ostensibly the slave or associate of the eralpa, but turns out at the end of the piece to be the lost child of some worthy citizen^. A good deal of ingenuity is shown in the contrivance of these un- expected recognitions (dvayvcoplaeL^), and here also the drama of Euripides had furnished the comedian with his model. The "heavy father," as he is called on our stage, is generally an indispensable personage, and in the intrigues of the piece he is often the dupe of the manoeuvring slave, or led by some incidental temptations into the very vices and follies which he had reproved in his son. The greatest care is taken in the delineation of these characters, and there can be little doubt that they represented accurately the most prominent features of the later Attic society. The di-ama under such circumstances did not attempt to make men better than they were, and it is to be feared that the comic stage did little more tlian present in the most attractive colours the lax morality of the age. It is not our intention to speak of the dramas and quasi-dramas of a later age ; it may however be of some assistance to the student, if we subjoin a general tabular view of the rise and progress of the proper Greek Drama. 1 Ovid, Fast, ii, 369 : Fabula jucundi nulla est siue amore Menandri. 2 See Rist. of Gr. Liter. Vol. in. pp. 2 sqq. D. T. G.