Three Periods in Attic History.--The Three Kinds of Comedy: Old, Middle, New.--Approximation of Comedy to the Type of Tragedy.--Athenæus as the Source of Comic Fragments.--Fragments of the Old Comedy.--Satire on Women.--Parasites.--Fragments of the Middle Comedy.--Critique of Plato and the Academic Philosophers.--Literary Criticism.--Passages on Sleep and Death.--Attic Slang.--The Demi-Monde.--Theophrastus and the Later Rhetoricians.--Cooks and Cookery-books.--Difficulty of Defining the Middle from the New Comedy.--Menander.--Sophocles and Menander.--Epicureanism.--Menander's Sober Philosophy of Life.--Goethe on Menander.--Philemon.--The Comedy of Manners culminated in Menander.--What we mean by Modernism.--Points of Similarity and Difference between Ancient and Modern Comedy.--The Freedom of Modern Art.
The two centuries during which comedy flourished at Athens may be divided into three marked periods of national and political existence. Between 448 and 404 B.C., under the Periclean administration and until the end of the Peloponnesian war, the Demos continued through all vicissitudes conscious of sovereignty and capable of indefinite expansion. Then came the dismantlement of Athens by Lysander and the dismemberment of the old democracy. From 404 to 338 B.C., Athens, though humbled to the rank of a second-class State, and confused in foreign and domestic policy, retained her freedom, and exercised an important influence over the affairs of Hellas. She no longer, however, felt within herself the force of youth, the ambition of conquest, or the pride of popular autocracy. Her intellectual activity was turned from political and constitutional questions inwards to philosophy and literature. From 338 to about 260 B.C. this metamorphosis of the nation was carried further and accomplished. Athens ceased to be a city of statesmen and orators, and became the capital of learning. She was no longer in any true sense free or powerful, though populous and wealthy and frequented by cultivated men of all nations. Not only had public interest declined, but the first fervor for philosophy was past. A _modus vivendi_ suited to a tranquil, easy, pleasure-loving people, who rejoiced in leisure and combined refined amusements with luxury, had been systematized in the Epicurean view of life. To accept the conditions of existence and to make the best of them, to look on like spectators at the game of the world, and to raise no troublesome insoluble questions, was the ideal of this period. Fifty years after the last date mentioned, the Romans set their foot on Hellas, and Greek culture began to propagate itself with altered forms in Italy.