stated to
have been pre-eminently fertile and successful. It was a comedy of
manners as well as character, although its ridicule of particular
classes of men tended to the creation of standing types, such as
soldiers, parasites, courtesans, revellers, and--a favourite figure
already drawn by Aristophanes[79]--the self-conceited cook. In style it
necessarily inclined to become more easy and conversational and to
substitute insinuation for invective; while in that branch which was
devoted to the parodying of tragic myths its purpose may have been to
criticize, but its effect must have been to degrade. This species of the
comic art had found favour at Athens already before the close of the
great civil war; its inventor was the Thasian Hegemon, whose
_Gigantomachia_ was amusing the Athenians on the day when the news
arrived of the Sicilian disaster.

The New Comedy.

Philemon and Menander.

III. _New comedy_, which is dated from the establishment of the
Macedonian supremacy (338), is merely a further development of Middle,
from which indeed it was not distinguished till the time of Hadrian. If
its favourite types were more numerous, including the captain (of
mercenaries)--the original of a long line of comic favourites--the
cunning slave, &c., they were probably also more conventional. New
comedy appears to have first constituted love intrigues the main subject
of dramatic actions. The most famous of the sixty-four writers said to
have belonged to this period of comedy were Philemon (fl. from 330),
Menander (342-329) and his contemporary Diphilus. Of these authors we
know something from fragments, but more from their Latin adapters
Plautus and Terence. As comedians of character, they were limited by a
range of types which left little room for originality of treatment; in
the construction of their plots they were skillful rather than varied.
In style, as well as to some extent in construction, Menander seems to
have taken Euripides as his model, infusing into his comedy an element
of moral and sentimental reflection, which refined if it did not enliven
it.

Decay of comedy.

New comedy, and with it Greek comedy proper, is regarded as having come
to an end with Posidippus (fl. c. 280). Other comic writers of a later
date are, however, mentioned, among them Rhinthon of Tarentum (fl. c.
300), whose mixed compositions have been called by various names, among
them by that of "phlyacographies" (from _phlyax_, idl