Lysistrata, and Plutus, have none. As the old Attic comedy was the offspring of the political and social vigour and freedom of the age during which it flourished, it naturally declined and ceased with the decline and overthrow of the freedom and vigour which were necessary for its development.--It was replaced by a comedy of a somewhat different style, which was known as the _Middle Comedy_, the age of which lasted from the end of the Peloponnesian war to the overthrow of liberty by Philip of Macedon. (Ol. 94-110.) The comedy of this period found its materials in satirizing classes of people instead of individuals, in criticising the systems and merits of philosophers and literary men, and in parodies of the compositions of living and earlier poets, and travesties of mythological subjects. It formed a transition from the old to the new comedy, and approximated to the latter in the greater attention to the construction of plots which seem frequently to have been founded on amorous intrigues, and in the absence of that wild grotesqueness which marked the old comedy. As regards its external form, the plays of the middle comedy, generally speaking, had neither parabasis nor chorus. The most celebrated authors of the middle comedy were Antiphanes and Alexis.--The _New Comedy_ was a further development of the last mentioned kind. It answered as nearly as may be to the modern comedy of manners or character. Dropping for the most part personal allusions, caricature, ridicule, and parody, which, in a more general form than in the old comedy, had maintained their ground in the middle comedy, the poets of the new comedy made it their business to reproduce in a generalized form a picture of the every-day life of those by whom they were surrounded. There were various standing characters which found a place in most plays, such as we find in the plays of Plautus and Terence, the _leno perjurus_, _amator fervidus_, _servulus callidus_, _amica illudens_, _sodalis opitulator_, _miles proeliator_, _parasitus edax_, _parentes tenaces_, _meretrices procaces_. In the new comedy there was no chorus. It flourished from about B.C. 340 to B.C. 260. The poets of the new comedy amounted to 64 in number. The most distinguished was Menander.--(2) ROMAN.--The accounts of the early stages of comic poetry among the Romans are scanty. Scenic entertainments were introduced at Rome in B.C. 363 from Etruria, where it would seem they were a familiar amusement. Tuscan players (_ludiones_), who were fetched from Etruria, exhibited a sort of pantomimic dance to the music of a flute, without any song accompanying their dance, and without regular dramatic gesticulation. The amusement became popular, and was imitated by the young Romans, who improved upon the original entertainment by uniting with it extemporaneous mutual raillery, composed in a rude irregular measure, a species of diversion which had been long known among the