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xlii General Introduction
to be relegated to a subordinate position and finally were altogether dispossessed.
We have now traced the history of comedy back to a period in which
the plays consisted of parodos, agon, parabasis, and komos-gamos.
This reconstruction is in the highest degree tentative and conjectural,
but it is at least based on real evidence, which, though entirely internal
and largely ambiguous, is nevertheless derived from genuine and extant
documents. Any attempt, however, to penetrate still further into the
past would be entirely jejune, for the obvious reason that it would
have to draw its conclusions from materials which are themselves hypothetical
reconstructions. The percentage of error thus becomes forbiddingly
large, and the pleasures of free speculation under conditions so
uncertain must not be allowed to blind us to the fact it is inevitably and
distressingly ineffectual. We can, with a species of probability, carry
the history of comedy back to a point at which derivation from some
elaborate ritual sequence appears indubitable, but the fact that we
possess no other evidence for the existence of such a rite means that
an attempt to bridge the gap between the reconstructed form of early
fifth-century comedy and its putative ritual ancestor will be a contribution
to the study of religion rather than to the history of the drama.
So much for the origins of Greek comedy and its development down
to 425 B.C. The chief general characteristic of its later history has
already been indicated and our task in what follows is mainly to illustrate
the victorious progress of tragic influence. But it must be confessed
in advance that we are very inadequately equipped to trace this
development; our documents are neither numerous nor well distributed
chronologically. The literary historian customarily distinguishes three
periods in the history of Greek comedy: the Old, which ended with
the fifth century, the Middle, which lasted until about 340 B.C., and
the New, whose best work was produced around 300, although plays
of this type continued to be composed even down into the Christian era.
Of all the thousands of comedies which were written in ancient Greece
we possess just fourteen. Nine of these belong to the last quarter of the
fifth century, two of them to the early years of the fourth; we do not
know the dates of the remaining three, but they can hardly be earlier
than 315 or later than 290. None of this triad is preserved entire, but
we have enough to form a reasonably good notion of what their total
qualities must have been. The materials are thus relatively abundant for
the latest phase of the Old Comedy and for the best period of the New,
where the close imitations of the Roman Terence supplement the extant
work of Menander, but the Middle Comedy is very inadequately represented
by a pair of plays from the earliest years of its long history. The
most serious disadvantage, however, lies in the fact that our documents