be regarded as an open question; "but there can be no doubt that
the manner and the object of the curé of Meudon were identical
with those of the great comedian of Athens; and that the name
of Pantagruelist, invented by the one, accurately describes the leading characteristics of his main prototype. The chief difference
between the Old Comedy of Athens, as represented by Aristophanes,
and the modern manifestations of the same riotous drollery, as a
cover for some serious purpose, which it might be premature, unsafe, or generally inexpedient to disclose, must be sought in the
peculiar relations which subsisted between the old comedian and
his democratic audience during the short period of the Old Comedy's
highest perfection, namely, the interval between the commencement
of the Peloponnesian war and the Sicilian expedition, when the
irritable Demos was so conscious of his power and was so exhilarated by his good fortune that, like the kings of the middle ages,
he was willing to tolerate any jokes at his own expense, if the
satirist would only pay him the compliment of adopting the thin
veil of caricature, and pretend to put forward as an outpouring of
privileged folly what he really meant to be taken as the most
serious remonstrance or the most biting reproof[1].
It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to draw a clearly defined line of demarcation between the latest writers of the Old and the earliest writers of the Middle Comedy. We cannot say of them that this author was on old comedian ; that a middle comedian: they may have been both, as Aristophanes certainly was, if the criterion was the absence or presence of a Parabasis[2], or speech of the chorus in which the audience are addressed in the name of the poet, and without, in many cases, any reference to the subject of the
- ↑ Aristophanes openly avows this mixture of the serious and the ridiculous in his
later comedies, when he no longer practised it with the same objects. Ran. 391 : (
Greek characters) Eccles. 1200: (Greek characters)
- ↑ (Greek characters) Platonius. With regard to the attempt of Meineke (Quæstion. Scenicæ, Sp. iii. p. 50) to prove that Antiphanes was a new comic poet, because he mentioned the (Greek characters)) (Athen. xiv., p. 662 F), we may remark, that the word cannot be used as a criterion to enable us to distinguish between two schools of comedians, for it is mentioned by Nicostratus, the son of Aristophanes (see Clinton in Phil. Mus. I. p. 560), and the dainty was not unknown to Aristophanes himself, who uses the word (Greek characters) (Nub. 451).
from Varro (L. L. v. 9, p. 4, Müller), who is speaking of Aristophanes, the grammarian of Byzantium, and of the grammatical studies of the Stoics; but Rabelais, like his commentators, may have misunderstood Varro.
