When I wrote that chapter, we were still dependent for our estimate of Menander and his society in the Latin translations, or adaptations, by Plautus and Terence, and there were those that thought the Roman adapters had chosen the trivial side of a society which might be not only refined but serious and thoughtful. The recent discovery of large fragments of four plays on a papyrus roll in Egypt has dissipated any such hopes. The same triviality, the same stupid repetition of vulgar and immoral plots and topics meet us throughout these scenes. If there be any moral lesson conveyed by the picture we here have of Attic society, it is this: that the slave and the prostitute were not only more intelligent, but less immoral than their masters. In all these so-called pictures of life, not a single person of the least distinction appears--not a single philosopher, or politician, or poet, or man of letters, or benefactor--though we know that the walls of temples and cities were being covered with panegyrics of leading citizens and their civic and private virtues. Not a single problem of religious or political importance is ever discussed. There is not even, in the new fragments, any wealth of that vulgar proverbial wisdom, or sententiousness posing as wisdom, which was gathered from the plays of Menander by diligent collectors, and which, surviving in thousands of lines, has given him a false importance in the histories of Greek literature. But here, as elsewhere, the lapse of ages had separated the wheat from the chaff; the later scholiasts and commentators gathered from Menander the stray gems, as one might pick from the array of a gay but stupid lady the real diamonds with which she had adorned her worthless person.