Note 22 — Chapter VI

On the other hand we find, in many of his plays, traces of intimate familiarity with the adventures of a mercantile life. It is most probable that some of the passages in which these appear would have been found in his originals had they been preserved to us. Yet the emotions of thankfulness for a safe return to harbour, or of curiosity and pleasure in landing at a strange town22, are expressed so frequently and with such liveliness as to seem like the reminiscence of personal experience. We get, somehow, the impression of one who had travelled widely, had 'seen the cities of many men and learned their minds,' had marked with humorous observation many varieties of character, had taken note, but without any special aesthetic sensibility, of the works of art which were scattered throughout the Hellenic cities, had shared in the pleasures which these cities held out freely to their visitors, and had encountered the dangers of the sea not without some sense of their sublimity and picturesqueness23. The God most frequently appealed to in prayer or thanksgiving is Neptune24. The colloquial use of Greek phrases in many of his plays seems to imply a familiar habit of employing them, in active intercourse with Greeks on his maritime adventures. The day-dream of Gripus, after finding his treasure, might almost be taken as a humorous comment on the various motives of curiosity and mercantile enterprise by which he himself was prompted to become engaged in maritime speculation:—