Shall we all a merry joke At Archedemus poke, Who has not cut his guildsmen yet, though seven years old; Yet up among the dead He is demagogue and head, And contrives the topmost place of the rascaldom to hold? And Clisthenes, they say, Is among the tombs all day, Bewailing for his lover with a lamentable whine. And Callias, I’m told, Has become a sailor bold, And casts a lion’s hide o’er his members feminine.[111] Here this abuse is dragged in a propos of nothing, and the three citizens who are assailed within a score of lines have no connection with the main theme of the play. It was this sort of thing, I venture to believe, that Crates discontinued; and Aristotle’s language does not require us to conclude that he relinquished scurrility altogether. It is usually thought, however, that Crates made no assaults of any kind upon his contemporaries but “generalized” his plots by treating imaginary, “ideal” characters in his plays. In other words, he is supposed to have anticipated to some extent the manner and material of New Comedy. I have no desire to combat this view, which simply advances a step beyond my own. The main fact, that of Crates’ having invented plot sequence in Attic comedy, can hardly be made a matter of dispute. We are indebted to a late authority, Tzetzes, for the following statements: But also Old Comedy differs from itself [i.e., falls into two types], for those who first established the institution of comedy in Attica (and they were Susarion and his successors) used to bring on the characters (πρόσωπα) in an undifferentiated crowd (ἀτάκτως), and laughter alone was the object sought. But Cratinus [a contemporary of Crates], succeeding them, put a stop to the confusion (ἀταξίαν) and set the characters (πρόσωπα) in comedy for the first time at three; and he added profit to the pleasure of comedy, lampooning the evildoers and chastising them with comedy as with a public scourge. But even he still shared in the archaic qualities and, slightly, in the confusion (ἀταξίας).[112]