A few of the fragments throw some light upon dramatic literature. Antiphanes (Poesis, fr. 1, p. 392) compares tragedy and comedy with covert irony: Blest indeed is the lot of a tragic play, for, to begin with, the spectators know the whole legend by the name it bears, and then, when the poet gets tired, he has only to lift the machine like his finger, and, hocus-pocus, all is ended; but in a comedy everything must be made from the beginning and explicitly set forth—persons, previous circumstances, plot, catastrophe, and episode—and if a jot or tittle is overlooked, Tom or Jerry in the pit will hiss us off the stage. The cathartic power of tragedy is described by Timocles (Dionysiazusæ, p. 614) in lines that sound like a common-sense version of Aristotle: Man is born to suffer, and there are many painful things in life; accordingly he has discovered consolation for his sad thoughts in tragedies, which lure the mind away to think of greater woes, and send the hearer soothed, and at the same time lessoned, home—the poor man, for example, finds that Telephus was still more poor, the sick man sees Alcmæon mad, the lame man pities Philoctetes and forgets himself; if one has lost a son, Niobe is enough to teach him resignation; and so on through all the calamities of life: gazing at sufferings worse than our own, we are forced to be contented.
Some of the most charming of the comic fragments are descriptions of sleep. A comedy variously ascribed to Antiphanes and Alexis bears the name of Sleep, and contains a dialogue (p. 570), of which the following is a version:
A. Not mortal, nor immortal, but of both
Blent in his being, so that gods nor men
Can claim him for their own; but ever fresh
He grows, and then dies off again to nothing,
Unseen by any, but well known to all.
B. Lady, you always charm me thus with riddles.
A. Yet what I say is clear and plain enough.
B. What boy is this that has so strange a nature?
A. Sleep, O my daughter, he that cures our ills.
Scarcely less delicate are the two following lines (pp. 749, 607):
ὅ τι προῖκα μόνον ἔδωκαν ἡμῖν οἱ θεοί,
τὸν ὕπνον,
and