ὕπνος τὰ μικρὰ τοῦ θανάτου μυστήρια.[129]
In this connection I may quote a beautiful fragment from Diphilus (Incert. Fab. fr. 5, p. 647) on Death and Sleep:
There is no life without its share of evil,
Griefs, persecutions, torments, cares, diseases:
Of these death comes to cure us, a physician
Who gives heart's ease by filling us with slumber.
Before engaging in a group of fragments more illustrative of common Greek life, I will call attention to the examples of Attic slang furnished by Anaxandrides (Odysseus, fr. 2, p. 424). To translate them into equivalent English would tax the ingenuity of Frere; but it is worth noticing that this argot, like that of our universities or public schools, is made up of the most miscellaneous material. Religious ritual, the theatre, personal peculiarities, the dust that is the plague of Athens, articles of dress, and current fables all supply their quota. It is, in fact, the slang of cultivated social life.
Next to cooks, parasites, and fishwives, the demi-monde of Athens plays the most prominent part in comedy of the middle period.[130] The following couplet from a play of Philetærus (Kunegis, fr. 3, p. 477) might be chosen as a motto for an essay on this subject:
οὐκ ἐτὸς ἑταίρας ἱερόν ἐστι πανταχοῦ,
ἀλλ' οὐχὶ γαμετῆς οὐδαμοῦ τῆς Ἑλλάδος.
This pithily expresses the pernicious relation in which the mistress, dignified by the name of companion, stood in Attic Hellas towards the married wife. The superiority of the former over the latter in popular appreciation is set forth with cynical directness by Amphis (Athamas, fr. 1, p. 480).
The Greeks had no sort of shame about intersexual relations; and of this perfect freedom of speech the comic poets furnish ample illustration in their dealing with the subject of adultery. There is not here the faintest trace of French romance. Sentiment of some kind is required to season the modern breaches of the seventh commandment. To the Greeks, who felt the minimum of romance in intersexual love, adultery appeared both dangerous and silly, when the laws of Solon had so well provided safety-valves for vice.[131] At the same time, the pages of the comic poets abound in violent invectives against licentious and avaricious women who were the ruin of young men. Anaxilas (Neottis, fr. 1, p. 501), in a voluble invective against "companions" of this sort, can find no language strong enough. They are serpents, fire-breathing chimeras, Charybdis and Scylla, sea-dogs, sphinxes, hydras, winged harpies, and so forth. Alexis describes the arts whereby they make the most of mean attractions, and suit their style to the current fashion (Isostasion, fr. 1, p. 537). Epicrates paints the sordid old age of once-worshipped Lais in language that might serve as a classic pendant to Villon's Regrets de la belle Héaulimiere (Antilaïs, fr. 2, p. 510). In no point does the civilized society of great cities remain so constant as in the characteristics of Bohemian life. In this respect Athens seems to have been much the same as Venice in the sixteenth, and Paris in the nineteenth century.
What these playwrights say of love in general scarcely differs from the opinions already quoted from the tragic poets. Amphis (Dithyrambus, fr. 2, p. 482) and Alexis (Helene, p. 532; Traumatias, fr. 2, p. 569; Phædrus, fr. 1, p. 571; Incert. Fab. fr. 38, p. 582) may be referred to by the curious. It is worth while at this point to mention that some valuable illustrations of the later Attic comedy are to be drawn from the collectors of characteristics, like Theophrastus, and from rhetoricians who condensed the matter of the comic drama in their prose. The dialogues of Lucian, the letters of Alciphron, the moral treatises of Plutarch and Maximus Tyrius, and the dissertations of Athenæus are especially valuable in this respect. Much that we have lost in its integrity is filtered for us through the medium of scholastic literature, performing for the middle comedy imperfectly that which Latin literature has done more completely for the new.
In dealing with the old comedy, one reference has been already made to cooks and cookery-books. In the middle comedy they assume still more importance, and in the secondary authors of the new comedy they occupy the foreground of the picture, thanks to Athenæus. Cooks at Athens formed a class apart. They had their stations in the market, their schools, their libraries of culinary lore, their pedantries and pride and special forms of knavery. The Roman custom of keeping slaves to cook at home had not yet penetrated into Greece. If a man wanted to entertain his guests at a dinner-party, or to prepare a wedding-feast, he had to seek the assistance of a professional cordon bleu, and the great chef ensconced himself for the day, with his subordinates, in the house of his employer. It is clear that these customs offered situations of rare comic humor to the playwright. Everybody had at some time felt the need of the professional cook, and everybody had suffered under him. In an age, moreover, which was nothing if it was not literary, the cooks caught the prevailing tone, and professed their art according to the rules of rhetoric.