CHAPTER XIX.

_THE COMIC FRAGMENTS._

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. Page 216