which happened at many removes, partly through the blood-soaked exaggerations of Seneca, exaggerated still
further in translation by Jasper Heywood, who became a Jesuit, was arrested, and died mad.
There is a sense in which Menander's comedies, filtered as they were through Plautus and Terence, gave us our
fundamental ideas about what human beings are like: not only through the refined and noble sentiments which
spread like bindweed through the whole literate world, in books of sayings and copybooks of every kind, but our
idea of urban man, and civilized man, and his limitations. That is surely because of Menander's apparent interest in
individuals and his real handling of types. As the life of individuals and the ambition of families became newly
interesting to the literate classes in the late Middle Ages, it was natural that ancient comedy should be their model.
Menander was part of the culture of St Paul; his unassuming nobility, his humanist maxims, above all his
universality and vague compassion had melted into the moral atmosphere. The urbanity and the liberty turn out to
be inseparable. Medieval and Byzantine satire are the steam screaming out of an engine. Horatian satire is quiet
and deadly; it derives from Athens, and runs through Voltaire and Diderot, nearly down to our own times. In
Byzantium, what comedy could there be? Only a venomous courtly hissing, or a popular comedy so low it would
escape notice: something like the shadow-theatre of Karaghiozis. Admirable as that is, it belongs to the comedies
of the 'volunteers', before comic poetry became an art. One of the bravest, most inspired steps the Athenian
democracy ever took was to make comedy a state event: for that to happen comedy had to exist already, and its
audience had to exist.
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