extant of this species of composition. Some fragments, however, remain of the _Lytiersa_ of Sositheus, an author who flourished about the 130th Olympiad, which was subsequent to the introduction of the new Greek comedy. Lytiersa, who gives name to this dramatic satire, lived in Phrygia. He used to receive many guests, who flocked to his residence from all quarters. After entertaining them at sumptuous banquets, he compelled them to go out with him to his fields, to reap his crop or cut his hay; and when they had performed this labour, he mowed off their heads, with a scythe. The style of entertainment, it seems, did not prevent his house from being a place of fashionable resort. Hercules, however, put an end to this mode of wishing a good afternoon, by strangling the hospitable landlord, and throwing his body into the Mæander. It is evident, from the subject of this play, and of the _Cyclops_, that the tragic satires were a sort of fee-fa-fum performance, like our after-pieces founded on the stories of _Blue Beard_ and _Jack the Giant Killer_. They were generally short and simple in their plan: They contained no satire or ridicule against the fellow-citizens of the author, or any private individuals whatever; but there was a good deal of jeering by the characters at each other, and much buffoonery, revelling, and indecency, among the satiric persons of the chorus. The Comic Satire began later than the Tragic, subsisted for some time along with it, and finally survived it. In Greece it was chiefly popular after the time of Alexander, and it also flourished in the court of the Egyptian Ptolemies. It was quite different from the Tragic Satire; the action being laid in cities, or at least not always amid rustic scenes. Private individuals were often satirized in it, and not unfrequently the tyrants or rulers of the state. When a mythic story was adopted, the affairs of domestic life were conjoined with the action, and it never was of the same enormous or bloody nature as the fables employed in the tragic satire, but such subjects were usually chosen as that of Amphitryon, Apollo feeding the flocks of Admetus, &c. Satyrs were not essential characters, and when they were introduced, private individuals were generally intended to be ridiculed, under the form of these rustic divinities. Gluttony, to judge from some fragments preserved by Athenæus, was one of the chief topics of banter and merriment. Timocles, who lived about the 114th Olympiad, was the chief author of comic satires. Lycophron, better known by his _Cassandra_, also wrote one called _Menedemus_, in which the founder of the Eretric school of philosophy was exposed to ridicule, under the character of Silenus, and his pupils under the masks of Satyrs.