The last poets of the Middle comedy were contemporaries of the writers of the New, who rose up as their rivals, and who were only distinguished from them by following the new tendency more decidedly and exclusively. Menander (342-293 B.C.) was one of the first of these poets, and he is also the most perfect of them. The Athens of his day differed from that of the time of Pericles, in the same way that an old man, weak in body but fond of life, good-humored and self-indulgent, differs from the vigorous, middle-aged man at the summit of his mental strength and bodily energy. Since there was so little in politics to interest or to employ the mind, the Athenians found an object in the occurrences of social life and the charm of dissolute enjoyment. Dramatic poetry now, for the first time, centred in love, as it has since done among all nations to whom the Greek cultivation has descended. But it certainly was not love in those nobler forms to which it has since elevated itself. Menander painted truly the degenerate world in which he lived, actuated by no mighty impulses, no noble aspirations. He was contemporary with Epicurus, and their characters had much in common; both were deficient in the inspiration of high moral ideas. The comedy of Menander and his contemporaries completed what Euripides had begun on the tragic stage a hundred years before their time. They deprived their characters of that ideal grandeur which had been most conspicuous in the creations of Aeschylus and the earlier poets, and thus tragedy and comedy, which had started from such different beginnings, here met as at the same point. The comedies of Menander may be considered as almost the conclusion of Attic literature; he was the last original poet of Athens; those who arose at a later period were but gleaners after the rich harvest of Greek poetry had been gathered.