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These two are inferior in comic action and the peculiar sweetness of Menander to the Andria, the Adelphi, the Heautontimorumenus, and the Eunuchus: but Phormio is a more dashing and amusing convivial parasite than the Gnatho of the last-named comedy.
The titles of my chapters do not always comprehend the whole matter, they often denote it by some mark only, as those other titles Andria Eunuchus, or these, Sylla, Cicero, Torquatus. I love a poetic march, by leaps and skips, 'tis an art, as Plato says, light, nimble; and a little demoniacal.
Yet will some bring in an example of Eunuchus in Terence, that containeth matter of two days, yet far short of twenty years. True it is, and so was it to be played in two days, and so fitted to the time it set forth. And though Plautus hath in one place done amiss, let us hit with him, and not miss with him.
What we have of him in Terence was chosen probably to please the cultivated Romans; and is a romantic play with a comic intrigue, obtained in two instances, the Andria and the Eunuchus, by rolling a couple of his originals into one.
Miles Gloriosus is the title of one of the comedies of Plautus; and one of the stock characters of the ancient comedy is a conceited, swaggering, brainless soldier, who is perpetually boasting of his own valor and exploits, and who takes the most fulsome and ridiculous flattery as the due recognition of his transcendent merit. The verse here quoted is from Terence's Eunuchus.
I encore the whole opera, and in the mean while let us applaud it as it deserves." The emperor gave the signal, and, midst a thunderstorm of plaudits, the musicians passed into their midnight feast. There is no record of any other such compliment, except that to the Latin dramatist, Plautus, whose "Eunuchus" was performed twice on the same day.
With his outrageous Tory hatred of the Yankees, he, of course, declares there's no comparison; ridicules the fac-simile, and hastily seizing what he mistakes for the counterfeit, confounds the company by a quotation from the Latin of "Terence" that very small fragment of the Eunuchus which Plunkett forced into his head through the opposite pole of his person
The dramas in which "contamination" is most successfully used are, the Eunuchus, Andria, and Adelphoe; the last-mentioned being the only instance in which the two models are by different authors, viz. the Adelphoi of Menander and the Synapothnaeskontes of Diphilus.
The eulogies of a bachelor life, which are so frequent in Menander, are repeated by his Roman remodeller only with characteristic shyness, whereas the lover in his agony, the tender husband at the -accouchement-, the loving sister by the death-bed in the -Eunuchus- and the -Andria- are very gracefully delineated; in the -Hecyra- there even appears at the close as a delivering angel a virtuous courtesan, likewise a genuine Menandrian figure, which the Roman public, it is true, very properly hissed.
Menander idealized them without purposely elevating. He satirized a certain Thais, and his Thais of the Eunuchus of Terence is neither professionally attractive nor repulsive; his picture of the two Andrians, Chrysis and her sister, is nowhere to be matched for tenderness.
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