VIII. The New Comedy.
The feeling on passing from the Middle to the New Comedy is like the fresh air on coming out of the bar of a public-house. The Middle Comedy is the last decaying branch of the old literature; the romantic New Comedy is one of the earliest and most vigorous offshoots of that new literature which sprang from the genius of Antimachus, and has continued to the present day. In the Middle Comedy, we are still face to face with the women of typical Athens, with the women of Aristophanes, at best with the women of Euripides,—and with the way in which typical Athens treated these women; in the New Comedy this is changed, and woman—the woman that can be loved as wife and mother—steps into her true place as object of, and partner in, the intensest and the purest passions of which humanity is capable.
It will be remembered that the Middle Comedy treatment, of women and love for women, had four main characteristics.
(1) The glorification of the Hetaera and of love for the Hetaera.
(2) The purely sensual nature of the love thus extolled.
(3) The ridicule of all love that was not sensual.
(4) The ridicule of family-life.
The New Comedy flatly contradicts every one of these principles. The love of which it treats is love for a virgin,[267] and the consummation of this love is marriage. Such love is by no means purely sensual; indeed, at times it is almost of a “Platonic” character. And lastly, not only is the sanctity of marriage strictly insisted upon, and the advantages of marriage as a system strongly maintained, but the family relations, anyhow among the younger generation, are often of a very pleasant character.
In fact, while the action of the Middle Comedy is concerned with a love, the consummation of which is a temporary sensual gratification, the action of the New Comedy is supplied by the efforts of its heroes and their adherents, to secure that the love which occupies so much of their thoughts may be made at once legitimate and permanent. It was New Comedy that first introduced on the stage the love of a life, as opposed to the love of an hour. If anyone were to ask what was the chief merit of Menander, the answer would be that he was the first to show the Athenians that “love for ever,” with which every poetaster and novel-reader has now been familiar for so many centuries.
But the differences between the treatment of women in the new literature, and that to which they were exposed in the literature we have just been studying, will be most readily made clear if we proceed at once to the detailed examination of the former.
The first and most prominent feature of the New Comedy treatment of the love of men for women is its insistance on marriage—that is to say, on a definite guarantee of permanence and constancy—as the one proper consummation of such love. In fact, as we have already had occasion to observe in another place, the idealisation of marriage is the basis of Greek romance.[268]
This insistance on marriage is, of course, most strikingly exemplified in the typical New Comedy plot, which is sufficiently familiar to every student of the Latin comedians. Thus, in five of these Latin plays, the Heauton Timorumenos (of Menander), the Phormio (of Apollodorus), the Rudens (of Diphilus), the Curculio, and the Poenulus,[269] the story is of exactly the kind that subsequently appears in the Greek novel—a young man falls in love with a virgin, and, after various misfortunes which threaten to separate the pair, they are eventually married, and live happily ever afterwards.
On this class of plot it is unnecessary to dwell, except that it may be worth while just to draw attention to the extremely passionate nature of the love which makes these young men so anxious to marry. The modern reader would instinctively expect that the confinement of love to these legitimate and, as one would now consider them, commonplace channels, would inevitably lead to a lessening of its charm, and a diminution of its force. As a matter of fact, the result was the very reverse. Not only has the character of man’s love for woman changed, but this love has developed an intensity of poetry and passion which has never belonged to it before.[270] Instances are easy to find; the most striking one is perhaps shown us at the meeting of Phaedromus and Planesium, in the Curculio (i. 3):
Pl. tene me, amplectere ergo! Ph. hoc etiam est quamobrem cupiam vivere.
quia te prohibet herus, clam hero potior. Pl. prohibet, nec prohibere quit,
nec prohibebit, nisi mors meum animum abs te abalienaverit.
Ph. sibi sua habeant regna reges, sibi divitias divites,
sibi honores sibi virtutes sibi pugnas sibi proelia!
dum mi abstineant invidere, sibi quisque habeant quod suum est![271]
But there are others, almost equally forcible, in the Rudens (iv. 8)—where particular enthusiasm is expressed at the prospect of marriage, as opposed to the relation which had previously been the lover’s highest possible ideal,—the Poenulus (v. 4, 49)[272], and elsewhere.
But another and equally important type of story is that in which the man first seduces the woman, and then subsequently marries her. Plays of this description are the Andria, the Eunuchus, the Adelphi (all by Menander), the Aulularia, and the Cistellaria.[273]
Of these, the Cistellaria is different from the rest. Here, the girl Silenium, who, though supposed to be the daughter of a lena, has been brought up as a virgin (i. 3, 24), is induced by a promise of marriage to live with the man Alcesimarchus, a promise which is afterwards fulfilled only after a considerable delay. (i. 1, 90-100.) In the other four cases, however—and this is very important—the promise of marriage is subsequent to the seduction, and takes the form, not of an inducement to, but of a reparation for the latter. The lover regards the seduction as a crime, for which he is willing to make amends to the utmost of his power, while at the same time he is anxious to perpetuate and legalise his amour. He therefore adopts what we are accustomed in modern times to call an “honourable course,” and offers marriage to the woman whom he has loved and still loves. The importance of this feature is twofold—firstly, the close association thus brought about between marriage and love of the most “romantic” and unconventional description; and secondly, the perpetuation and legalisation of a form of love which is obviously by nature temporary and illegitimate. And thus the love-stories of the New Comedy may be said to begin where those of the Middle Comedy end; while the heroes of the latter are concerned with achieving the temporary satisfaction of their sensual desires, the heroes of the former are occupied in striving to make permanent atonement for the indiscretions which such desires have led them to commit.
To quote instances of what has been said: in the Andria the promise of marriage is distinctly an act of reparation, which the lover feels himself in duty bound to make. This is evident from the argument of Sulpicius Apollinaris,[274] and from various passages in the play.[275] The same is the case in the Adelphi.[276] Here Aeschinus, as soon as he considers what he has done, comes to the mother of Pamphila, and begs with tears to be allowed to marry her by way of reparation.[277] In the Aulularia, the petition of Lyconides to the miser Euclio is animated by a very similar spirit.[278] In the Eunuchus (which is, it must be remembered, the love-story of a boy of sixteen)[279], there is no opportunity for any such behaviour on the part of Chaerea, though his sincere regret (ii. 3, 33 seqq.), and his enthusiasm when the possibility of marriage becomes apparent (v. 8, 1 seqq.), show clearly enough that he is not intended to be an exception to the general rule.
It must not, however, be supposed that the feeling, which prompts the various characters of whom we have spoken to make reparation for their wrongdoing, is merely a feeling of repentance, or a regard for public opinion. It is love, and love of a most passionate kind, that makes them so anxious to marry the women they have wronged. Of the enthusiasm of the hero of the Eunuchus at the prospect of marriage we have already spoken; in the Adelphi, Aeschinus is equally elated under similar circumstances;[280] in the Aulularia, the anxiety and persistency of Lyconides are evidently inspired by the same feeling;[281] in the Andria, Pamphilus protests that nothing short of death will divide him from Glycerium.[282] That love which the Middle Comedy could not conceive of as outliving its sensual gratification, appears in the New Comedy, not weakened, but strengthened by time, and obstacles only serve to make the lover more determined to perpetuate and to legalise those emotions which had, to a previous generation, owed their chief charm to their freedom from the restraints of constancy and propriety.
In the Hecyra again, it is by marriage that, through a strange coincidence, the hero is eventually able to repair the wrong done to the heroine. In the Stichus, too, the plot turns on the constancy of two wives to their absent husbands,[283] while, in the Trinummus, there seems strong reason to believe, that it is not all love for Lesbonicus which makes Lysiteles so anxious to marry the former’s sister.[284]
To this evidence from the plays themselves may be added some further evidence of a more general kind. Marriage is mentioned by the anonymous author of the epigram in the C. I. G. 6083, as the most characteristic feature of Menander’s plays—
φαιδρὸν ἑταῖρον Ἔρωτος ὁρᾷς, σειρῆνα θεάτρων,
τόνδε Μένανδρον, ἀεὶ κρᾶτα πνκαζόμενον,
οὕνεκ’ ἄρ’ ἀνθρώπους ἱλαρὸν βίον ἐξεδίδαξεν,
ἡδύνας σκηνὴν δράμασι πᾶσι γάμῳ.
Still more emphatic is the testimony of Plutarch, who asserts (Sympos. vii. 712 C) that Menander is peculiarly suited for married men to hear and read—
ἔχει δὲ καὶ τὰ ἐρωτικὰ παρ’ αὐτῷ καιρὸν πεπωκόσιν ἀνθρώποις καὶ ἀναπαυσαμένοις μετὰ μικρὸν ἀπιοῦσι παρὰ τὰς ἑαυτῶν γυναῖκας ... αἵ τε φθοραὶ τῶν παρθένων εἰς γάμον ἐπιεικῶς καταστρέφουσι. κ.τ.λ.
Indeed, the essentially “proper” character of the Menandrean drama is emphasised by more than one ancient writer. That Comedy could be anything but indecent was a revelation to Athens of the fourth century, and it was a revelation for which she does not seem to have been particularly grateful; but the fact that it was a writer whose works were fit “pueris virginibusque legi,” who revolutionized the dramatic art, is one that a modern student of that revolution cannot afford to forget.[285]
Two of the plays mentioned above, the Hecyra and the Stichus, lead naturally to the consideration of another feature of the New Comedy treatment of marriage—a feature which, though less strongly marked than that of which we have just been speaking, is yet, if one considers what Greek feeling had previously been on this matter, perhaps even more remarkable. Not only is marriage held up as the lover’s ideal, but the actual married state is described as a state of happiness, and married people, even those who have been married for some time, are introduced to us as strongly attached to one another. How complete a revolution in Greek feeling such a state as this implies, need hardly be emphasised.[286] Yet, in the Stichus, we have a plot based on the determination of two women to remain faithful to their husbands (who have been absent for three years) in spite of the efforts of their father to induce them to do otherwise; they insist on remaining faithful, though their husbands are poor (Plaut. Stich. i. 2, 75 seqq.), and though they are uncertain whether their devotion is returned (i. 1, 36 seqq.). In the Hecyra again, it is the behaviour of Philumena after marriage which wins her husband’s heart (Ter. Hec. i. 2, 85 seqq.)—a remarkably modern form of love-story.
Various fragments, too, of Menander have a similar import, such as the famous passage from the Misogynes on the advantages of marriage—
ἐλθόντ’ εἰς νόσον
τὸν ἔχοντα ταύτην ἐθεράπευσεν ἐπιμελῶς,
ἀτυχοῦντι συμπαρέμεινεν, ἀποθανόντα τε
ἔθαψε, περιέστειλεν οἰκείως. (Fr. 1, 9.)
or Menand. Incert. 73, where the husband takes up the cudgels in his wife’s behalf. Incert. 101, again, dwells on the close relationship existing between man and wife—
οἰκεῖον οὕτως οὐδέν ἐστιν, ὦ Λάχης,
ἐὰν σκοπῇ τις, ὡς ἀνήρ τε καὶ γυνή,
Incert. 100 points out that a wife must rule her husband by love—
ἕν ἐστ’ ἀληθὲς φίλτρον, εὐγνώμων τρόπος.
τούτῳ κατακρατεῖν ἀνδρὸς εἴωθεν γυνή,
and a careful reader will have no difficulty in finding other more or less important examples of the same spirit, both in Menander and in the Latin Comedians.
One important exception there is, of course, to this state of affairs, and that is the relation between the old men and their wives. The types of the hen-pecked husband and the Xanthippe-like wife are too familiar to need illustration. But here it is to be observed, that the husbands who appear in this position, are always old or elderly men, and this fact is probably not without its significance. In describing his elderly married men as unhappy, Menander was ridiculing, not marriage, but the mariages de convenance which had, before his time, been the regular thing at Athens. “These men are unhappy,” says Menander, “not because they are married, but because they have married wives whom they never loved, and whom they chose merely because of their money, or to please their relations. If they had married for love, the case might well have been different.” And thus the hen-pecked husband, who belongs to the old régime, is only a further argument in favour of the romantic love-matches of which Menander approved.
Of course the matter did not stop here. It was so easy to raise a laugh with a row between husband and wife, that Comedy was sure not to abandon the subject, even after its raison d’être had disappeared; and a modern audience, we know, is just as ready to laugh at the husband who has lost his latch-key as were the Athenians of the fourth century. But the point to be remembered is, that a pair of characters like Chremes and Sostrata in the Heauton Timorumenus, or Laches and Sostrata in the Hecyra, furnishes no real argument against the view that Menander and his followers of the New Comedy regarded marriage, if properly entered upon, as a state of happiness.
Another exception, and one that is perhaps in reality a more important one, is furnished by Menander’s Misogynes, a work which gained very great popularity, doubtless owing to the way in which it appealed to the lower instincts of the audience whom its author was trying to educate up; but here it has to be observed that, in the first place, as the play is lost, it is impossible to say what the actual dénouement was; while, secondly, there was no reason why a man of Menander’s versatile genius should not for once treat the subject of married life in an unusual manner, without in any way abandoning his general views on the subject.[287]
A further feature of the New Comedy treatment of marriage is the universal respect for its sanctity.[288] The adulterer, who is the favourite hero of mediaeval romance, is here invariably held up to contempt and hatred. The most familiar instance of this is, of course, the story in the Miles Gloriosus of Plautus, but it is far from being an isolated one. The Halieis of Menander evidently treated of a somewhat similar subject,[289] which appears once more in the Eunuchus.[290] In the Andria again, Charinus is horror-stricken at the idea of committing adultery with the woman he loves, though, when accused of seducing the same woman, his only regret is that he cannot plead guilty to the charge.[291] An even more remarkable instance, and one perhaps without parallel, is furnished by the Hecyra, where the Hetaera Bacchis asserts that she had refused to admit her lover, Pamphilus, as soon as she learned that he was married.[292] It may be argued, of course, that she did this out of pique, but the very cordial nature of the meeting between the two (Ter. Hec. v. 4, 16, seqq.), and the fact that Bacchis knew that her lover had abandoned her sorely against his will (i. 2, 45 seqq.), and was still devoted to her (i. 2, 82), seem to suggest that this is not the most natural explanation of her conduct.[293]
The passages just described may serve to introduce us to a further feature of our subject—a feature in which the New Comedy is, if possible, even more remarkably unlike the Middle Comedy than in those which have already been discussed. In the Middle Comedy, as we have already had frequent occasion to observe, the wife and the husband are invariably held up to ridicule when compared with the Hetaera and her lover; in the New Comedy we may find this position exactly reversed. Instances are rare, (as is indeed to be expected, when we consider, in the first place, the strong current of popular feeling on the subject, and, secondly, the personal relations between the leading writers of the New Comedy and the prominent Hetaerae of the time,) but they do unquestionably occur. The most striking example is perhaps that in the Heauton Timorumenus, where not only is the Hetaera contrasted unfavourably with the virgin, (as she herself admits,)[294] but her lover is made consistently ridiculous as compared with the lover who contemplates marriage, and in the end comes off badly in the extreme. Very similar evidence is furnished by the Hecyra. In the struggle for the love of Pamphilus, which takes place in that play between the wife and the Hetaera, the former is completely successful, and her victory is gained by sheer amiability of temper (Ter. Hec. i. 2, 85 seqq.); indeed, so charming is she, that the Hetaera is driven in the end to congratulate her husband on his good fortune in having married her. (v. 4, 22.) And this victory of the wife becomes the more remarkable, when we observe that the Hetaera is evidently intended to be a very favourable specimen of her class, in every way deserving of the lover she is compelled to lose.[295]
While on this point, it may not be amiss to remark that it is by no means impossible that the famous Thais of Menander really belonged to this class of plays, and that the Hetaera, who gives her name to the piece, is intended as a parody on the typical Hetaera of Middle Comedy. This view, which is not improbable in itself, receives some support from the mock-heroic tone of Fr. 1 of the Thais,[296] and still more from Mart. xiv. 187;[297] but cannot, of course, be regarded as more than a possible suggestion.[298]
Of mere vulgar ridicule or abuse of the ordinary Hetaera, as heartless,[299] mercenary,[300] and the like, there is, of course, enough and to spare; but it would be unjustifiable to claim expressions such as these as distinctive of New Comedy, in the face of passages like Epicrates, Antilais, 2, or Anaxilas, Neottis, 1. Menander indeed makes a more serious charge, perhaps, when one of his characters asserts that an Hetaera cannot be good, for she makes a trade of sin:
οὐδέποθ’ ἑταίρα τοῦ καλῶς πεφρόντικεν,
ἣ τὸ κακόηθες πρόσοδον εἴωθεν ποιεῖν.
(Incert. 107.)
This is, however, an isolated expression, for Menand. Incert. 36, at first sight similar, is really different.
But, though the writers of the New Comedy are careful, as a general rule, to avoid anything that might have seemed too severe a stricture on that system of Hetaera-worship which was so distinctive a feature of the age, they are unmistakably emphatic in their assertion that such sensual love is not the only kind of love of which a man is capable. The chivalrous manner in which the lover of New Comedy often behaves to his lady, is one of the clearest features of the change which the authors of the romantic school had succeeded in bringing about on the Athenian stage.
At once the most striking and the most perplexing illustration of this is furnished by the character of Thrasonides in Menander’s celebrated play, the Misumenus. This Thrasonides, who belongs to the regular type of the Miles Gloriosus, is in love with a slave-girl, whom he has obtained in the course of his wars;[301] but he has so disgusted her with his boasting (like Leontichus in Lucian) that she has conceived a most violent hatred for him. He then, though she is his slave, and though his passion is so great that he cannot sleep for thinking of her,[302] instead of using his undoubted power to accomplish what he wishes,[303] tries every means that he can imagine in order to conciliate her, “sending her gifts, and weeping, and praying,”[304] that she may look more favourably upon him.
The dénouement of the play is lost. It is not impossible that in the end the slave-girl was identified as an Athenian, and carried off by some more acceptable lover, who thus profited by the chivalrous conduct of his rival, or she may even have turned out to be the soldier’s sister, as in the Curculio or the Epidicus, in either of which cases the scruples of Thrasonides would be necessary to the working of the plot. But all this is, for our present purpose, of no importance. What is of importance, and of the utmost importance, is the fact that Thrasonides, though he is so violently in love with the girl, will not make use of his unquestioned power to gratify this passion, because of the dislike which she feels for him. In fact, his love is of such a kind that he does not merely want to satisfy a sensual appetite—he wants to be loved. Unless he can feel that she loves him, none of those privileges, which, to the ordinary Hetaera-lover of the day, would have been of themselves the complete consummation of love, are of any value to him. ἔξεστί μοι τοῦτο καὶ βούλομαι, οὐ ποιῶ δέ.
The aim of the lover is not to gratify himself, but to inspire love.[305] That we are here face to face with a form of love which is not only actually absent from Middle Comedy, but is by nature absolutely foreign to that literature and could not possibly appear in it, is too obvious to need further emphasis.[306]
This much, then, is clear; but there remains a most perplexing question, which, though it is a little aside of our immediate subject, is yet too interesting to be passed by altogether. Why is it Thrasonides, the Miles Gloriosus whom all the Comedians are banded together to ridicule, who appears as the most chivalrous lover of the whole of New Comedy?[307] Why is a man who is universally regarded as a fool, made to give expression to such elevated sentiments, and to follow such a noble line of conduct? The first explanation that suggests itself is, of course, “Because he is a fool.” This view is certainly advanced in a passage of Plutarch, where Thrasonides is compared to the miser who starves rather than make use of the food he has in the house,[308] and seems to find favour too with Thrasonides’ own slave.[309] But this explanation is not a very satisfactory one, somehow. However great a fool Menander might wish to make of the mercenary soldier of the time, this does not seem the natural line for his folly to take, nor was it the line, as we know from historical evidence, that the folly of these people actually did as a rule take. A Pyrgopolinices must, one would have thought, have been a far more familiar figure to citizens who had enjoyed a Macedonian occupation, than a Thrasonides. One might, perhaps, imagine that the behaviour of Alexander to the wife and daughters of Darius—behaviour which was regarded in Greece as somewhat remarkable[310]—had suggested the character of Thrasonides, for, after all, the ideal soldier of the age, whether for good or evil, is always Alexander; only it seems doubtful whether a single action of an unusual kind could serve to form so constant a type as the chivalrous soldier-lover. At one time I thought that, as the soldier of New Comedy has generally served in Asia, perhaps he might be supposed to have imported his advanced romantic ideas from one of those Greek Asiatic cities which were, as we know, the original home of Greek romance, and indeed of all important developments of Greek erotic literature.[311] But there is to modern notions so great an incongruity in the idea of, say, the Colonel of a West India regiment so influenced by the latest school of literature as to model his life on it, that, though such a character would not, perhaps, have seemed so absurd to the Greeks as it does to us, still, in the absence of all definite evidence, I have preferred not to lay undue stress upon what is, after all, entirely a matter of conjecture. Indeed, the question remains to me a very obscure one, and I cannot at present see any satisfactory solution of it.
But, whatever may have been the causes which led to the creation of this particular character, the soldier-lover of a more or less Thrasonides type is an unquestionable feature of New Comedy. Besides the hero of the Misumenus, of whom we have spoken, in the Sicyonius (also by Menander) we find another soldier, Stratophanes, who buys a slave-girl, and then treats her as if she were a free woman.[312] To the same class of feeling, though expressed in a somewhat different way, belongs the remorse which the soldier Polemon (in the Periceiromene of Menander) feels for the wrong he has done to his αἰχμαλώτῳ ἐρωμένῃ.
A case in some respects similar, though in others different, is that of the soldier Stratippocles, in the Epidicus, who falls in love with his captive, but does not touch her.[313] The differences, of course, here are that, firstly, the play belongs to Middle Comedy, its moral being that Stratippocles will be happier with his fidicina than with the girl of high birth, for whom he has formed the chivalrous attachment;[314] while, secondly, the continence of the hero is not so much a feature of his character as a necessity for the development of the plot; and, thirdly, the soldier is here not a mercenary, but an Athenian citizen, who has been fighting against the Thebans. But though, therefore, the case of the Epidicus does not belong to the same category as those previously discussed, the association in it of the soldier with chivalrous behaviour towards women is yet worthy of notice, and, even if only a coincidence, is still an interesting one.[315]
Apart, too, from these very remarkable instances, there are not a few passages scattered about in the remains of the New Comedy which serve to show that the “love,” of which there is so much talk in that literature, is not the merely animal passion of an earlier period. Of these, a striking one is that preserved in Plutarch, ap. Stob. Flor. lxiii. 34:
τῶν Μενάνδρου δραμάτων, says Plutarch there, οὐκ ἴσως ἁπάντων ἓν συνεκτικόν ἐστιν ὁ ἔρως, οἷον πνεῦμα κοινὸν διακεχυκώς; ὃν οὖν μάλιστα θιασώτην τοῦ θεοῦ καὶ ὀργιαστὴν ἴσμεν, τὸν ἄνδρα συνεπιλαμβάνωμεν εἰς τὴν ζήτησιν, ἐπεὶ καὶ λελάκηκε περὶ τοῦ πάθους φιλοσοφώτερον. ἄξιον γὰρ εἶναι θαύματος φήσας τὸ περὶ τοὺς ἐρῶντας, ὥσπερ ἐστὶν ἅμα λαλεῖ. εἶτα ἀπορεῖ καὶ ζητεῖ πρὸς ἑαυτόν·
τίνι δεδούλωταί (sc. ὁ ἐραστής) ποτε;
ὄψει; φλύαρος. κ.τ.λ....
... καιρός ἐστιν ἡ νόσος
ψυχῆς.
(Menand. Incert. 14.)
That is: Menander, a writer familiar with love in its most passionate forms (θιασώτην καὶ ὀργιαστήν), gives us a sober and serious view of the matter. After expressing his astonishment at the ways of lovers, he furnishes us with a realistic account of love as it actually is (ὥσπερ ἐστὶν ἅμα λαλεῖ),[316] and then proceeds to investigate its causes. For a moment he is puzzled, and questions with himself, but soon he finds the true answer. καιρός ἐστιν ἡ νόσος ψυχῆς. Love is an affection of the soul as distinct from the body, and has only an accidental connection with the latter.[317]
Equally forcible, though in another way, is a passage from the Poenulus. The lover and his slave are watching the two girls, and the slave expresses his utter contempt for his master’s “Platonic” affection, to which the latter answers that he loves Adelphasium as he loves the gods.[318] Another case is in the Curculio, where the love of Phaedromus for Planesium is fed on nothing more substantial than kisses;[319] another in the Hecyra, where it is distinctly pointed out that the love of Pamphilus for his wife is induced by other than sensual considerations.[320] Other instances, of more or less significance, every reader of the Latin comedians will be able to supply for himself; and it is further worth observing that when a New Comedy character, as occasionally does happen, is made to speak slightingly of “Platonic” love, such a character is always a slave, never a person of refinement.[321]
To proceed to the final point of essential difference between Middle and New Comedy, it will be remembered that, in the former class of literature, family life and the mutual relations of members of a family were among the stock subjects of ridicule, and that no remarks expressive of any other views on this matter are to be found there, at any rate before a very late period.[322] Family life, as depicted in the New Comedy, is by no means ideal; indeed, as we have already had occasion to remark, the unhappy relations between husband and elderly wife are, under certain circumstances, a favourite subject of ridicule, even with Menander.[323] But yet instances to the contrary are to be found, and are, in fact, by no means very uncommon. Not to speak of the cases of devotion of wife to husband and husband to wife—such as those in the Stichus, &c., already sufficiently discussed[324]—the relations between father and children, and, still more, mother and children,[325] are often described as of the most delightful character.
Of the former, there are interesting examples in Menand. Incert. 59:
αἰσχύνομαι τὸν πατέρα, Κλειτοφῶν, μόνον,
ἀντιβλέπειν ἐκεῖνον οὐ δυνήσομαι
ἀδικῶν· τὰ δ’ ἄλλα ῥᾳδίως χειρώσομαι.
Incert. 108:
ὁ σκληρότατος πρὸς υἱὸν ἐν τῷ νουθετεῖν
τοῖς μὲν λόγοις πικρός ἐστι, τοῖς δ’ ἔργοις πατήρ.
Incert. 113:
μηδὲν ὀδύνα τὸν πατέρα, γιγνώσκων ὅτι
ὁ μέγιστον ἀγαπῶν δι’ ἐλάχιστ’ ὀργίζεται.
Incert. 117:
οὐδέποτ’ ἀληθὲς οὐδὲν οὔθ’ υἱῷ πατὴρ
εἴωθ’ ἀπειλεῖν, οὔτ’ ἐρῶν ἐρωμένῃ.[326]
The charming interview between the father and his two daughters in the Stichus (i. 2, 32 seqq.), is a further, equally striking instance.
Of the latter relation, that between mother and children, there is a good instance in this same play (i. 2, 51), where, after the father has propounded his intention of marrying again, his daughter reminds him that it will be hard for him to find a second wife like his first.
An. pol ego uxorem quaero, postquam vostra mater mortua est.
Pa. facile invenies et peiorem et peius moratam, pater,
quam illa fuit; meliorem neque tu reperies neque sol videt.
A still more striking case is that in the Hecyra, where the mother of Pamphilus, thinking that it is her presence which renders it impossible for her son’s wife to live with him, resolves to sacrifice herself, and go into voluntary exile into the country.[327] The same idea, though less pleasantly expressed, is apparent in Syrus’ remark in the Heauton Timorumenus (v. 2, 38):
matres omnes filiis
in peccato adiutrices, auxilio in paterna iniuria.
But it is needless to multiply instances of a state of affairs with which every attentive reader of Plautus and Terence must be sufficiently familiar.[328]