And tell to earth and heaven—my cuisinerie!
And Plautus in his Merchant (vss. 3 ff.) preserved a more explicit passage from the same poet of New Comedy:
I do not do as I’ve seen others do
In comedies, who through the power of love
Tell night, day, sun, or moon their miseries.
The foregoing statement of Euripidean usage is far from exhaustive. Yet it is necessary to hasten on. Quite apart from the effects which may be secured from monologues in choral drama, there are no less than three additional uses to which they can easily be put in chorusless plays. In terms of classical drama, therefore, they will appear most frequently in Greek New Comedy and in Plautus and Terence.
In the first place when two characters meet on the stage and talk it is necessary for them either to appear simultaneously at the two entrances (and it is self-evident that this method cannot be employed very often without seeming ridiculous) or for one of them to enter first and fill up a slight interval before the other’s arrival by soliloquizing. Such an entrance monologue occurs at the beginning of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, where the bearer of the title-rôle complains:
Now were they summoned to some shrine of Bacchus,
Pan, Colias, or Genetyllis, there had been
No room to stir, so thick the crowd of timbrels.