Tragedy and comedy, though they began so differently, had been gradually approximating to one type, so that between Menander and the latest followers of Euripides there was scarcely any distinction of form and but little difference of subject-matter. The same sententious reflection upon life seasoned both species of the drama. The religious content of the elder tragedy and the broad burlesque of the elder comedy alike gave place to equable philosophy. The tragic climax was sad; the comic climax gay: more license was allowed in the comic than in the tragic iambic: comedy remained nearer to real life and therefore more interesting than tragedy. Such, broadly speaking, were the limits of their differences now. In this approximation toward artistic similarity comedy rather than tragedy was a gainer. It is clear that the Aristophanic comedy could not have become permanent. To dissociate it from the peculiar conditions of the Athenian democracy was impossible. Therefore the process by which the old comedy passed into the middle, and the middle into the new, must be regarded as a progression from the local and the accidental to the necessary and the universal. The splendor that may seem to have been sacrificed belonged less to the old comedy itself than to the genius of Aristophanes, who succeeded in engrafting the most brilliant poetry upon the rough stock of the Attic farce. Tragedy, on the contrary, lost all when she descended from the vantage-ground of Æschylus. It must not, however, be imagined that the change in either case depended upon chance. It was necessitated by the internal transmutation of the Athenians into a nation of students, and by the corresponding loss of spontaneity in art. For the full development of the comedy of manners a critical temper in the poet and the audience, complexity of social customs, and inclination to reflect upon them, together with maturity of judgment, were required. These conditions, favorable to art which seeks its motives in a spirit of tolerant, if somewhat cynical, philosophy, but prejudicial to the highest serious poetry, account for the decline of tragedy and the contemporaneous ascent of comedy in the fourth century B.C. The comedy of Menander must therefore be considered as an advance upon that of Cratinus, though it is true that this comedy is the art of refined and senescent, rather than of vigorous and adolescent, civilization, and though it flourished in the age of tragic dissolution. In the Vatican may be seen two busts, of equal size and beauty, wrought apparently by the same hand, and finished to the point of absolute perfection. One of these is Tragedy, the other Comedy. The two faces differ chiefly in the subtle smile that plays about the lips of Comedy, and in the slight contraction of the brows of Tragedy. They are twin sisters, born alike to royalty, distinguished by such traits of character as tend to disappear beneath the polish of the world. There is no suggestion of the Cordax in the one or of the Furies in the other. Both are self-restrained and dignified in ideality. It was thus that the two species of the drama appeared to the artists of the later ages of Hellenic culture.