turies—than he is in the plays of Plautus or of Terence, who transferred him bodily from their Greek original: for the Romans themselves were not likely to furnish examples of him, and no hired mercenary would have ventured to swagger in those days at Rome. To a Roman audience this could only have been one of those conventional characters, made to be laughed at, which an easy public is very often willing to accept from an author's hands. He is sometimes accompanied by the Parasite, who is content to eat his dinners on condition of listening to his military reminiscences, and occasionally drawing them out for the benefit of others,—acting, in short, generally as his humble foil and toady. This is a character almost peculiar to the comedy of this school, and which has not found its way much into the modern drama. In the Athens of Menander, and in the Rome of Plautus and Terence, when life was altogether more in public, and when men of any moderate position seldom dined alone, the character, though not in the exaggerated form which suited the purpose of the comic dramatist, appears to have been sufficiently common. Athenæus, from whose curious 'Table-Talk ' we learn so much about the social life of those times, notes three distinct classes of the Parasite. There was the professed talker—the narrator of anecdotes and sayer of good things—who was invited to "make sport" for the guests who might be too grand or too dull to amuse each other; and this useful class of "diner-out" is not altogether unknown in modern society. This variety of the character seems to have not unfrequently "read up" carefully in preparation for the display of the evening, as modern
