favourite poet with critics, in Greece as in Rome, was Menander; and if
some of his rivals here and there surpassed him in comic force, and out-
stripped him in competition by an appositeness to the occasion that had
previously in the same way deprived the genius of Aristophanes of its due
reward in Clouds and Birds, his position as chief of the comic poets of
his age was unchallenged. Plutarch very unnecessarily drags Aristophanes
into a comparison with him, to the confusion of the older poet. Their
aims, the matter they dealt in, and the times, were quite dissimilar. But
it is no wonder that Plutarch, writing when Athenian beauty of style was
the delight of his patrons, should rank Menander at the highest. In what
degree of faithfulness Terence copied Menander, whether, as he states of
the passage in the Adelphi taken from Diphilus, _verbum de verbo_ in the
lovelier scenes--the description of the last words of the dying Andrian,
and of her funeral, for instance--remains conjectural. For us Terence
shares with his master the praise of an amenity that is like Elysian
speech, equable and ever gracious; like the face of the Andrian's young
sister:

'Adeo modesto, adeo venusto, ut nihil supra.'

The celebrated 'flens quam familiariter,' of which the closest rendering
grounds hopelessly on harsh prose, to express the sorrowful confidingness
of a young girl who has lost her sister and dearest friend, and has but
her lover left to her; 'she turned and flung herself on his bosom,
weeping as though at home there': this our instinct tells us must be
Greek, though hardly finer in Greek. Certain lines of Terence, compared
with the original fragments, show that he embellished them; but his taste
was too exquisite for him to do other than devote his genius to the
honest translation of such pieces as the above. Menander, then; with
him, through the affinity of sympathy, Terence; and Shakespeare and