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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.
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.
His first play was produced in the year that Caecilius died, 166 B.C.; the Hecyra next year; the Hauton Timorumenos in 163; the Eunuchus and Phormio in 161; the Adelphoe in 160; and in the following year the poet died at the age of twenty-six, while sailing round the coast of Greece. The maturity of mind shown by so young a man is very remarkable.
The Eunuchus is reflected in the Bellamira of Sir Charles Sedley and Le Muet of Brueys; the Adelphi in Moliere's Ecole des Maris and Baron's L'Ecole des Peres; and the Phormio in Moliere's Les Fourberies de Scapin.
However, don't be afraid, for those same persons are praised by myself, and will continue to be so. Yet, after all, there was also the motive spurring me on to undertake his defence, of which, during the trial, when I appeared for him, I remarked that I was doing just what the parasite in the Eunuchus advised the captain to do: "As oft as she names Phædria, you retort With Pamphila.
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 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.
Among its contents are parts of two odes of Pindar, of which one begins with a description of the poet's relation to Xenocritus, the inventor of the Locrian mode of music; a considerable piece of the "Kolax" of Menander, one of the two plays upon which the "Eunuchus" of Terence was based; part of a rhetorical treatise in Doric dialect, which is undoubtedly a work of the Pythagorean school; the conclusion of the eighteenth Keo-Tcfe of Julius Africanus, dealing with a question of Homeric criticism; and part of a biography of Alcibiades.
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