Now these observations are not meant as an attempt to rehabilitate Leo’s doctrine that the New Comedy merely borrowed all its devices of prologue, fate, recognition, and the rest from tragedy. Prescott’s incisive criticism[9] of that view must stand, with its insistence that we take Sicilian antecedents, Aristophanes, and environment into account. The new comedy was hardly as helplessly unoriginal as Leo held. The problem we have raised should rather be approached from the viewpoint of what the spectator expected and desired. It did not necessarily arise in the construction of plotless farces, in the presentation of ludicrous situations, buffoonery, and scenes centering about comical and preposterous characters. When, however, the plot was involved and a long consistent story was to be unraveled, the spectators, who knew nothing of the story, desired to be put at the same point of vantage early in the play that they naturally enjoyed when an _Oedipus_, a _Medea_, or an _Orestes_ was presented. When we turn to the Roman stage we seem to discover an attempt to break away from this convention, if not in Plautus[10] at least in Terence. We do not find conclusive evidence that Plautus seriously changed the construction of the Greek plots which he used except to remove the choral interludes and turn the plays into musical comedies, though it is likely that he usually avoided plays that had very intricate plots, and chose freely from those that contained laughter-producing situations. There is no evidence that he sought for suspense, or revamped any of his originals in order to attain it. Terence, however, despite his fondness for the Greek originals and his outspoken claim of fidelity to them, seems consciously to have striven for a suspended dénouement. He does not entirely suppress dramatic irony, but he reduces its scope, he eliminates the expository prologue completely, he is chary about giving information to the spectator, preferring to keep him under tension for a part if not for the whole of the play. A brief reference to the _Adelphoe_, his last play, will best reveal his procedure. Here two brothers employ different methods in bringing up their sons. Micio, who has adopted one of Demea’s sons, is indulgent, Demea is severe. Both boys enjoy themselves, Micio’s confessedly, Demea’s secretly. In fact the latter throws the burden of his escapades on Micio’s son. Hence when the action begins (1. 182) Demea is found scolding Micio because Micio’s son is setting a bad example to his supposedly virtuous brother. This is completely in Menander’s ironic style, for, as we shall see, Menander in the original had a prologue informing the audience that Demea’s son was the rascal of the two boys.