To these three periods in the national existence of Athens the three phases through which comedy passed correspond with almost absolute accuracy. Emerging from the coarse Megarian farces and the phallic pageants of the Dionysian Komos, the old comedy, as illustrated by Aristophanes, allowed itself the utmost license. It incarnated the freedom of democracy, caricaturing individuals, criticising constitutional changes, and, through all its extravagances of burlesque and fancy, maintaining a direct relation to politics. Only a nation in the plenitude of self-contentment, conscious of vigor and satisfied with its own energy, could have tolerated the kind of censorship these comic poets dared to exercise. The glaring light cast by Aristophanes upon abuses in the State reminded his audience of the greatness and the goodness that subsisted with so much of mean and bad. From their high standpoint of security they could afford, as they imagined, to laugh, and to enjoy a spectacle that travestied their imperfections. At the same time an undercurrent of antagonism to the Aristophanic comedy made itself felt from time to time. Laws were passed prohibiting this species of the drama in general (#mê kômôidein#), or restricting its personality (#mê kômôidein onomasti#), or prohibiting the graver functionaries of the State from exhibiting comic plays. These laws, passed, abrogated, and repassed between 440 and 404 B.C., mark the ebb and flow of democratic liberty. After the humiliation of Athens at the close of the Peloponnesian war, the political subject-matter of the old comedy was withdrawn, and the attitude of the audience was so altered as to render its peculiar censorship intolerable. Meanwhile, the speculative pursuits to which the Athenians since the days of the sophists had addicted themselves began to tell upon the character of the nation, now ripe for the second or literary stage of comedy. The poets of this period had not yet arrived at the comedy of manners which presents a close and faithful picture of domestic life. They directed their wit and humor against classes rather than characters. Philosophers and poets, parasites and hetæræ, took the place of the politicians. Nor did they abandon the old art-form of Attic comedy, for it is clear that the Chorus still played an important part in their plays. At the same time, in comedy as in tragedy, the Chorus came to be less and less an integral part of the drama; and while more attention was paid to plot and story, the grotesque allegories of the first period were dropped. The transition from the old to the middle comedy is signalized by the _Frogs_ of Aristophanes, which, maintaining the peculiar character of the elder form of art, relinquished politics for literature. The new comedy, known to us through the fragments of Menander and the Latin imitations, abandoned the Chorus altogether, and produced a form of art corresponding to what we know as the comedy of character and manners in the modern world. Interest was concentrated on the fable, and the skill of the poet was displayed in accurate delineations of domestic scenes. The plot seems to have almost invariably turned on love-adventures. Certain fixed types of character--the parasite, the pimp, the roguish servant, the severe father, the professional captain, the spendthrift son, the unfortunate heroine, and the wily prostitute--appeared over and over again. To vary the presentation of these familiar persons taxed the ingenuity of the playwright, as afterwards in Italy and France, during the tyranny of pantaloon and matamore, Leandre and prima amorosa.