the case; but in the Athenian period the dramatists and historians
give little information, if we accept the highly idealised burlesque
of the Aristophanic Comedy. Of the New Comedy too little is preserved
to be of much use, and even in it the whole atmosphere was very
conventional. The Greek novel did not come into existence till too
late; and, when it came, it took the form of romance, concerning
itself more with the elaboration of sentiment and the excitement of
adventure than with the portraiture of real manners and actual
surroundings. For any detailed picture of common life, like that which
would be given of our own day to future periods by the domestic novel,
we look to ancient literature in vain. Thus, when we are admitted by a
fortunate chance into the intimacy of private life, as we are by some
of the works of Xenophon and Plutarch or by the letters of the younger
Pliny, the charm of the picture is all the greater: and so it is with
the epigrams that record birthdays and bridals, the toys of children,
the concord of quiet homes. We see the house of the good man,[1] an
abiding rest from the labours of a busy life, bountiful to all,
masters and servants, who dwell under its shelter, and extending a
large hospitality to the friend and the stranger. One generation after
another grows up in it under all good and gracious influences; a
special providence, under the symbolic forms of Cypris Urania or
Artemis the Giver of Light, holds the house in keeping, and each new
year brings increased blessing from the gods of the household in
recompense of piety and duty.[2] Many dedications bring vividly before
us the humbler life of the country cottager, no man's servant or
master, happy in the daily labour over his little plot of land, his
corn-field and vineyard and coppice; of the fowler with his boys in
the woods, the forester and the beekeeper, and the fisherman in his
thatched hut on the beach.[3] And in these contrasted pictures the
"wealth that makes men kind" seems not to jar with the "poverty that