Note 87 — Chapter XV

Comedy is divided by the Grecian critics into three branches; the old, the middle, and the new. Of the two latter we know little, since the works of Aristophanes, the only perfect comedies extant, belong, with one exception, to the first. It would be foreign to our purpose to enter here into a description of them; but it may be generally stated that they were of a milder character; the licence of personality was gradually retrenched, and with it, the political importance of the stage. The lines of distinction cannot be drawn with much precision, but the former of them seems to commence early in the fourth century B.C., the latter in the reign of Alexander, which began B.C. 336. The total loss of the new comedy, and especially of Menander, is perhaps the greatest that classic literature has sustained. It appears from the remaining fragments to have been of a highly polished and moral cast. But a good idea of its general form and tendency may be derived from Plautus and Terence, of whose plays several are little more than translations from it.