Chapter XVIII: Aristophanes (2)

With this parallel between the _Birds_ and an opera like the _Zauberflöte_ in our minds, we may place ourselves among the thirty thousand Athenian spectators assembled in the theatre about the end of March, 414 B.C. We must remember that the great expedition had recently gone forth to Sicily. It was only in the preceding year that the Salaminian galley had been sent for Alcibiades, who had escaped to Sparta, where he was now engaged in stirring up evil for his countrymen. But as yet no disaster had befallen the army of invasion. Gylippus had not arrived. Lamachus was still alive. Every vessel brought news to the Athenians of the speed with which their forces were carrying on the work of circumvallation, and of the despondency of the Syracusans. The spectators of the plays of Aristophanes and Ameipsias were nearly the same persons who had listened to the honeyed eloquence of Alcibiades persuading them to undertake the expedition, and promising them not merely the supremacy of Hellas, but the empire of the Mediterranean and the subjugation of Carthage. Alcibiades, indeed, had turned a traitor to his country; but the charm of his oratory and the spirit he had roused remained. Each father in the audience might fairly hope that his son would share in raising Athens to her height of splendor: not a man but felt puffed up with insolent prosperity. The only warning voice which spoke while Athens trembled on the very razor-edge of fortune was that of Aristophanes--but with how sweet and delicate a satire, with sarcasms that had the sound of flattery, with prognostications of failure that wore the shape of realized ambitions, with musical banter and multitudinous jests that seemed to apologize for folly rather than to censure it! There is no doubt but that Aristophanes intended in the _Birds_ to ridicule the ambition of the Athenians and their inveterate gullibility. Peisthetærus and Euelpides represent in comic caricature the projectors, agitators, schemers, flatterers, who, led by Alcibiades, had imposed upon the excitable vanity of the nation. Cloud-cuckootown is any castle in the air or South Sea bubble which might take the fancy of the Athenian mob. But it is also more especially the project of Western dominion connected with their scheme of Sicilian conquest. Aristophanes has treated his theme so poetically and largely that the interests of the _Birds_ is not, like that of the _Wasps_ or the _Knights_, almost wholly confined to the Athens of his day. It transcends those limitations of place and time, and is the everlasting allegory of foolish schemes and flimsy ambition. A modern dramatist--Ben Jonson or Molière, for instance, perhaps even Shakespeare--could hardly have refrained from ending the allegory with some piece of poetical justice. We should have seen Peisthetærus disgraced and Cloud-cuckootown resolved into "such stuff as dreams are made of." But this is not the art of Aristophanes. He brings Peisthetærus to a successful catastrophe, and ends his comedy with marriage songs of triumph. Yet none the less pointed is the satire. The unreality of the vision is carefully maintained, and Peisthetærus walking home with Basileia for his bride, like some new sun-eclipsing star, seems to wink and strut and shrug his shoulders, conscious of the Titanic sham.

To analyze in detail a work of art so well known to all students as the _Birds_ would be needless. It is enough to notice in passing that it is quite unique of its kind, combining, as it does, such airy fancies as we find in the _Midsummer-Night's Dream_ with the peculiar pungency of Aristophanic satire, untainted by the obscenity which forms an integral part of the _Ecclesiazusæ_ or _Lysistrata_. Most exquisite is the art with which Aristophanes has collected all the facts of ornithology, all the legends and folklore connected with birds, so as to create a fanciful birdland and atmosphere of true bird life for his imaginary beings. Not less wonderful is the imagination with which he has conceived the whole universe from the bird's point of view, his sympathy with the nightingale, the drollery of his running footman Trochilus, the pompous gravity of his King Epops, and so on through the whole of his winged _dramatis personæ_. The triumph of his art is the Parabasis, in which the birds pour forth melodious compassion for the transitory earth-born creatures of an hour. Poor men, with their little groping lives! The epithets of pity which the happier birds invent to describe man are woven, as it were, of gossamer and dew, symbols of fragility. Then the music changes as the vision of winged Eros, up-soaring from the primeval windegg, bursts upon the fancy of the Chorus. Again it subsides into still more delicate irony, when the just reign of the birds on earth and over heaven is prophesied; and the whole concludes with semichorus answering to semichorus in antiphonal strains of woodland poetry and satire--the sweet notes of the flute responded to by shouts of Bacchic laughter.

We have seen in dealing with the _Birds_ how Aristophanes converted the whole world into a transcendental birdland, and filled his play with airy shapes and frail imaginings. This power of alchemizing and transmuting everything he touches into the substance of his thought of the moment is no less remarkable in the comedy of the _Clouds_. And here we are able to mark the peculiar nature of his allegory more clearly than in the choruses of the _Birds_, with greater accuracy to distinguish the play of pure poetry alternating with satire, to trace the glittering thread of fancy drawn athwart the more fantastic arabesque of comic caricature. In the _Clouds_ Aristophanes ridicules the rising school of teachers who professed to train the youth of Athens in the arts of public speaking and successful litigation. He aims at the tribe of sophists, who substituted logical discussion for the old æsthetic education of the Greeks, and who sought to replace mythological religion by meteorological explanations of natural phenomena. The pedantry of this dialectic in its boyhood offended the artistic sense of a conservative like Aristophanes: the priggishness of upstart science had the air to him of insolent irreligion. Besides he saw that this new philosophy, while it undermined the #êthos# of his nation, was capable of lending itself to ignoble ends--that its possessors sought to make money, that their disciples were eager to acquire mere technical proficiency, in order to cut a fine figure in public and to gain their selfish purposes. The sophists professed two chief subjects: #ta meteôra#, or the science of natural phenomena; and rhetoric, or the art of conquering by argument. Aristophanes, in the _Clouds_, satirizes both under the form of allegory by bringing upon the stage his Chorus of Clouds, who, in their changeful shapes--heaven-obscuring, appearing variously to various eyes, coming into being from the nothing of the air, and passing away again by imperceptible dissolution, usurping upon the functions of Zeus in the thunder and the rain, hurrying hither and thither at the will of no divine force, but impelled by the newly discovered abstraction Vortex--are the very forms and symbols of the airy, misty Proteus of verbal falseness and intangible irreligion which had begun to possess the Athenians. In order to understand the force of this allegory, we must remember the part which the clouds played in the still vital mythology of the Greeks. It was by a cloud that Hera in her divine scorn had deluded the impious desires of Ixion, who, embracing hollow shapes of vapor, begat Centaurs. The rebellious giants who sought to climb Olympus were forms of mist and tempest invading the serenity of highest heaven: this Strepsiades indicates when he quotes the words #plokamous th' hekatonkephala Typhô# as referring to the clouds. It was in cloudy vision that gods appeared to mortals or escaped their sight; in cloud that the Homeric heroes were snatched from death by their Olympian patrons; in clouds that Æolus dwelt and Danaë was prisoned. The Harpies were wind-tossed films of frothy cloud; the Sirens daughters of foam and mist. Everything that deceived and concealed, that shifted and eluded, that stole away "the enchanted gazer's mind," all Maya or delusion, all fascination and unrealizable desire, was symbolized by clouds. Nor was it without meaning that the clouds ascended from Ocean, from the wily parent of wave and storm, the inscrutable hoarder of secrets locked within the caverns of the murmuring deep, who might never be taken in any one clear form, who loved to cozen and betray, whose anger was swift and fretful against such as caught him in their toils. The clouds were his daughters, and so was Aphrodite--beautiful, deceitful, soul-subduing--these his offspring of the air, this his child of the foam--these pouring glamour on the eyes of men, this folding their hearts in snares. Without being fanciful, we might follow this analysis through a hundred labyrinths, all tending to show how exquisite to the apprehension of a Greek steeped in mythological associations must have been the allegory of the clouds. We might, moreover, have pointed out the care of Aristophanes to maintain this mythological propriety. Even in the Parabasis, for instance, where the Chorus comes forward in its human character as the representative of the poet, there occurs a semi-choric strain of great beauty, hymning the elemental deities of Sun, Air, Ocean, and all-covering Heaven, who are the parents and especial patrons of the clouds; for the Sun begets them from the fountains of the Sea, the Air receives and gives them shape as they drift through her yielding realm, and the great Zeus of the sky compels them to his service, stores them with his thunder, and makes a palace for them in his adamantine home, and wreathes their dances round his footstool of the firmament. But it is enough to have pointed out the main features of the allegory. The scope which it afforded for the display of splendid poetry was of course immense. From the first moment of the appearance of the Chorus to the end we never lose sight of their cloudy splendor, and, as in the case of the _Birds_, every thought, playful or imaginative, which can be conceived relating to the world of clouds, is pressed by Aristophanes into his service.

Early in the play the fount of poetry which they suggest springs pure and clear from the flinty rock of previous satire. Socrates, who has just been displayed to us as the insignificant anatomizer of fleas and gnats, rises suddenly to this height in his invocation:

"O Sovereign King, immeasurable Air, who keepest the earth
balanced, and blazing Ether, and sublime goddesses, ye Clouds
of lightning and of thunder, arise, appear, dread queens, in
mid-air to your Thinker!"

It is only in the last word, notice, that the comic smile breaks out.

"Come, then, ye reverend Clouds, honor this neophyte with your
dread beauty! whether upon Olympus's holy snow-swept peaks ye
sit, or in the gardens of father Ocean weave the dance with
nymphs, or in golden pitchers draw the waters of Nile, or in
Mæotis bide, or on the white eyries of Mimas: listen, receive
our sacrifice, be gracious to our rites."

With what radiance of imagination the haunts of the clouds are here enumerated! Sometimes we see them floating in virginal processions above unfooted snows, sometimes enthroned like queens in solemn silence on aerial watch-towers, sometimes dissolved in dew far down among the Oceanides, or brooding, filmy vapors, on the face of broad untroubled lakes.

Aristophanes, it may be said in passing, never dwells upon the more tempestuous functions of the clouds as stormy and angry powers: that would be to violate his allegory, which must always show them deceitfully beautiful, spreading illusion over earth and sky.

In answer to the invitation of Socrates, the Clouds are heard behind the stage chanting a choric hymn;[119] and here it must be remarked that the poet has revealed subtle instinct, for before exhibiting his Chorus, arrayed in veils of filmy gauze, to the people, by which he might have risked the possibility of exciting ludicrous instead of solemn ideas, he enlists the imagination of the audience by a sublime strain of preparatory music, vocally realizing the splendor of the coming Clouds before they strike the eyes of the spectators.

It is to the repeated roll of distant thunder that they sing their untranslatable entrance hymn. Behold them rising, silent domes and pinnacles and towers, from the burnished mirror of the noonday sea: how the sunlight flashes on their pearly slopes and fills their deeply cloven valleys: how dewy bright and glistening they are! Then watch them scale the vault of heaven, quitting the horizon with its mists, marching in tranquil state across the spaces of blue ether, gliding to their thrones among the mountain pines! There they repose, and at their feet is heard the clamor of the streams, the deep rebounding boom of sea waves; but they are seated in serenity, and below them lies the champaign with its fruits of holy earth, and on their broad immortal marble fronts the unwearied light of the sun-god plays. From their girdles to their sandals falls the robe of mist that wrapped them round, and on the watch-towers of the world they sit, bare in their beauty, godlike forms.

Such is the vision which this inimitable Chorus evokes. Its truth has been felt by all who have seen the rising of summer clouds from the waters of the Mediterranean. Indeed, this Chorus belongs to the highest order of poetry. Not only does it furnish an example of the freshness which is peculiar to Aristophanes, but it is in the deepest sense an intuition into the inmost life of nature. We hear in it the voice of a true seer or interpreter, who knows by choice of words and rhythms how to convey his own impressions to our mind. Even Shelley, when he wrote his _Cloud_, had grasped perhaps the secret of the pomp and splendor of cloudland less firmly than Aristophanes has done, though his images are piled so multitudinously, and every thought or fancy that a cloud suggests is whirled, as it were, in the drift of brilliant and radiant shapes. Aristophanes has this advantage--that something of the mythopoeic power still survived in Greece, and that he shared the sculptural genius of his race. Moreover, his audience were prepared by their religious associations to conceive of his Clouds as living creatures, and he was writing for the stage, where the poetry of personification is made easy by direct appeal to the eyesight.

In the _Clouds_ as it has been transmitted to us, Aristophanes employs another and more direct form of allegory. He brings upon the stage the #dikaios logos# in controversy with the #adikos logos#--the former representing the old conservative education of Athens; the other the new theories and modes of life which were beginning to spring up. It has been conjectured that #dikaios logos# wore the mask of Aristophanes himself, and #adikos logos# that of Thrasymachus the sophist. If this conjecture hits the truth, it is curious that the vulgar logician whom Socrates handles so severely in Plato's _Republic_ should have been chosen as the ideal of his doctrine and influence--the special pleader of the Phrontisterion. The contest between these two impersonations of modesty and impudence, of manliness and effeminacy, offers a unique example in Greek comic literature of what was common on our own stage about three centuries ago. The Just and Unjust Logoi dispute and wrangle for the favor of Pheidippides precisely like the abstractions in _Hycke Scorner_ or _Lusty Juventus_. Of course this kind of allegory is much coarser and affords less scope for poetical treatment than the exquisite mythus of the _Clouds_. The Logoi are but masks or hollow automata, from behind which the poet utters his arguments: there is no illusion of the senses, no enchantment of the fancy in their presentation. Yet the speech of Dikaios Logos forms one of the purest and most beautiful passages that Aristophanes has written, in its simple and affectionate picture of old Athenian life. The poet, we fear, was very far behind his age: he looked back to the good times when the sailor only knew enough to sing out "Ahoy!" and call for biscuit: he wanted the Athenian lads to have broad backs and sluggish tongues: he was dead to the advantages of dialectic and Socratic definition: he kept trying to bring back the days of Marathon, when nothing could avert the coming days of Syracuse and Ægospotami and Chæronea. We who read the history of Athens by the light of our Grote, we who are rolling our waves towards the rising instead of the setting sun, know now how very perverse and un-advanced the poet was. Yet, for all that, can we fail to be charmed with the picture that he draws of Greek boyhood in the good old times, and to contrast it favorably with the acknowledged impudence and profligacy of Critias and Agathon and Alcibiades--the friends and pupils of Socrates? "In that blissful time," says Dikaios Logos, "when I flourished, and modesty and temperance were practised, a boy's voice was never heard; but he would set off at daybreak, in snow or sunshine, with his comrades to the school of the harper, where he learned the ballads of our forefathers in praise of Pallas; and from the harper he would run to the training-ground and exercise himself with the decorum befitting virtuous youth." The rules for the behavior of boys which Aristophanes here enunciates provoke a modern smile; for the morality of Athens obliged lads to observe the same sort of propriety which we expect from girls. But for all his modesty, the youth of those days was not a milksop. He did indeed shun the public baths and the agora, repel the advances of profligate persons, respect his parents, avoid Hetairai, and form in his breast an image of Aidos; yet he frequented the wrestling-ground, and grew fair in form and color with generous exercises, not "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought," nor bent and jaded by the restless wrangling of the law courts; but among the sacred olive-trees of the Academy he ran races with his comrade, "crowned with white reeds, smelling of bindweed and careless hours and leaf-shedding poplar, rejoicing in the prime of spring, when the plane-tree whispers to the elm." In these last lines we touch the very core of Greek aristocratic conservatism--that imperious demand for leisure, for #scholê tôn anankaiôn#, of which Aristotle speaks as an essential in the life of free men; that contempt of all serious time-consuming business which we find in Plato; that respect for the beauty of the body, and that dislike of every occupation that tended to degrade its form or spoil the freshness of its color; that sympathy with nature in her graceful moods; that well-bred nonchalance; that love of the gymnasium with its poplar sacred to Herakles, the god of endurance, and its plane-tree of swift Hermes--in a word, those accumulated æsthetical prejudices which marked the race pre-eminent for its artistic faculty, the caste of rich and idle citizens supported by a nation of slaves, the unique and never-again-to-be-imitated people, who once and for all upon this earth of ours attained perfection, realized the ideal towards which we vainly strive.

With the last lines of this speech in our memory, we may turn to the dialogues of Plato, whose Phædrus and Charmides and Lysis are true children and disciples of Dikaios Logos; or to the Autolycus of Xenophon's _Symposium_, whose breast is as smooth, and skin as bright, and shoulders as broad, and tongue as short, as even Aristophanes could wish; or we may set before us some statue like the Apoxyomenos of Lysippus, or the Discobolos of Myron, and feel that we have gathered, in fancy at least, the flower of the perfection of the pride of Hellas.

Much of the allegory of Aristophanes consists of metaphors taken literally and expressed by appropriate symbolism to the audience. Thus, Trugaios actually drags the goddess Peace, with her attendants Opora and Theoria, from the well, the Chorus, while they help him, singing "Yoho!" like sailors at a capstan. In the same comedy, War and Havoc are exhibited with a gigantic mortar, in which they bray the States of Greece. Socrates suspended in his basket is a metaphorical allegory of this sort, his posture being peculiarly expressive of star-gazing and abstract speculation at a time when the objects of such contemplations were called #ta meteôra#. Of the same kind is the balance in which the lines of Æschylus and Euripides are weighed. Any poet might use the metaphor (weighed in the balance and found wanting); but it is a stretch of metaphorical license to exhibit an actual pair of scales upon the stage. Many of the figurative actions of the Hebrew prophets were practical appeals to the imagination, similar to these allegories of Aristophanes. Indeed, such dramatic metaphors may be reckoned among the most powerful instruments in the hands of a great master. Had Dante conceived a mask upon the politics of Italy, we doubt not but that he would have employed some energetic symbols of this sort; and, in passing, it may be said that no artist has appeared in modern times so capable of constructing an allegorical drama in the style of Aristophanes as Dante. The symbolism of the _Wasps_ is somewhat different from that with which we have been dealing. In this play the Chorus were armed, no doubt, with lance-like stings; but there was no attempt on the poet's part, as in the case of the _Clouds_ and _Birds_, to maintain the illusion of their being wasps. They talk and act like old men; their waspishness is merely metaphorical, and the allegory ends in an appeal to the eyesight. The _Plutus_, on the other hand, presents an example of allegory in the strictly modern sense. It is a Greek anticipation of our moralities, of such a play as might be founded on a portion of the _Pilgrim's Progress_. Wealth and Poverty appear upon the stage, and speak appropriately. Avarice and Prodigality are satirized. The use and abuse of riches are contrasted in a series of incidents framed with expressly moral purpose. The whole play is singularly un-Aristophanic. We have here no "Weltvernichtungsidee"--no nightingales or climbing apes to speak of. For this very reason it has been copied in modern times (its inner nature rendering it capable of adaptation to our tastes) by Ben Jonson in the _Staple of News_, and by Goethe in the second part of _Faust_.

One word must be devoted to the _Thesmophoriazusæ_. In the history of dramatic literature, the chief interest of the play is that it differs from the other works of Aristophanes in its structure. It has a regular plot--an intrigue and a solution--and its persons are not allegorical, but real. Thus it approaches the standard of modern comedy. But the plot, though gigantic in its scale, and prodigious in its wealth of wit and satire, is farcical. The artifices by which Euripides endeavors to win Agathon to undertake his cause, the disguise of Mnesilochus in female attire, the oratory of the old man against the women in the midst of their assembly, his detection, the momentary suspension of the dramatic action by his seizure of the supposed baby, his slaughter of the swaddled wine-jar, his apprehension by Cleisthenes, the devices and disguises by which Euripides (in parody of his own tragic scenes) endeavors to extricate his father-in-law from the scrape, and the final ruse by which he eludes the Scythian bowmen, and carries off Mnesilochus in triumph--all these form a series of highly diverting comic scenes. There is no passage in Aristophanes more amusing than the harangue of Mnesilochus. The other women have abused Euripides for slandering their sex in his tragedies. Mnesilochus, the humorous and coarse old rustic, gets up in his flimsy female gear, and eloquently reminds them of the truths which Euripides _might_ have divulged. One crime after another is glibly and facetiously recorded, until the little heap of calumnies uttered by Euripides disappears beneath the mountain of confessions piled up by the supposed matron. The portrait, too, of Agathon in the act of composition is exquisitely comic. By comparing it with that drawn by Plato in the _Banquet_, we may to some extent estimate the amount of truth in Aristophanic caricature. The meaningless melodious style--the stream of honeyed words,[120] _summa delumbe saliva_--with which Agathon and his Chorus greet our ears is scarcely more a parody of his poetry than the speech on love is of his prose. Agathon is discovered lying on a sofa, arrayed in female garments and smelling of cosmetics; when asked why thus attired, he lisps a languid answer that he is composing a tragedy about women, and wants to be in character:

The poet ought to keep in harmony
With any subject that he has to treat:
If women be his theme, then must his person
Be toned and fashioned to a female mood;
But when he writes of men he has no need
To study change; 'tis only what we have not
We seek to supplement by dressing up.
Besides, how unæsthetic 'tis to see
A poet coarse and hairy! Just remember
Famed Ibycus, Anacreon, Alcæus,
Who made our music and our metres flow,
Wore caps, and followed soft Ionian fashions:
And Phrynichus--this surely you have heard--
Was beautiful and beautifully dressed;
And this, we cannot doubt, is why his plays
Were beautiful; for 'tis a natural law
That like ourselves our work must ever be.

Modern writers upon whose lips _in udo est Mænas et Attis_ might take some of this satire not inaptly to themselves. But the crowning sport of the _Thesmophoriazusæ_ is in the last scene, when Mnesilochus adapts the _Palamedes_ and the _Helen_ of Euripides to his own forlorn condition, jumbling up the well-known verses of these tragedies with coarse-flavored rustical remarks; and when at last Euripides himself acts Echo and Perseus to the Andromeda of his father-in-law, and both together mystify the policeman by their ludicrous utterance of antiphonal lamentations.

I have but scanty space for touching on one of the topics which the _Thesmophoriazusæ_ suggests--the satire of Aristophanes upon Athenian women, whom he invariably represents as profligate, licentious, stupid, drunken, thieves, and liars. Whether they were in any sense as bad as he has painted them--and he has given them a worse character than any other Greek poet, not even excepting Simonides of Amorgos--or whether their absence from the comic spectacles encouraged a paradoxical misrepresentation of their worst and most exceptional qualities, is not easy to decide. This at least is clear that, while comic exaggeration is obvious in every detail, the picture, overdrawn and coarse as it may be, accords with that of other and less copious Greek satirists; nor could it have been tolerated in a society where women held a station of respect and honor.[121]

The point of the _Thesmophoriazusæ_, so far as the women are concerned, is that while Aristophanes pretends to show up Euripides for his abuse of them, his own satire is far more searching, and penetrates more deeply into the secrets of domestic life. What are the crimes of Phædra in comparison with the habits he imputes to Athenian wives and daughters? The _Lysistrata_ will not bear discussion; but in passing I may notice the humor of the oath by wine which the inexorable heroine and her Spartan friend administer. Other oaths might be broken, but no Athenian wife or maid would incur the penalty of this dread imprecation: "If I fail, may the bowl be filled with water." Of the three comedies which treat of women, the _Ecclesiazusæ_ has the most permanent interest. Indeed, _mutatis mutandis_, its satire might almost be adapted to the present day, or to the future which our theorists upon the rights of women are preparing. The Athenian ladies disguise themselves as men, and crowd the assembly, where they outvote their husbands, sons, and brothers, and proclaim the supremacy of women in the State. Praxagora, the agitator of the scheme, is chosen strategis. She decides that a community of property and free-trade between the sexes are the two things wanted to insure general felicity. The point of the satire consists in this: that the arguments by which the women get the upper-hand all turn on their avowed conservatism; men change and shift, women preserve their old customs, and will maintain the #êthos# of the State; but no sooner have they got authority than they show themselves more democratic than the demagogues, more new-fangled in their political notions than the philosophers. They upset time-honored institutions and make new ones to suit their own caprices, squaring the laws according to the logic of feminine instincts. Of course speculations like those of Plato's _Republic_ are satirized in the farcical scenes which illustrate the consequences of this female revolution. But perhaps the finest point about the comedy is its humorous insight into the workings of women's minds--its clear sense of what a topsy-turvy world we should have to live in if women were the lawgivers and governors.

In quitting Aristophanes I am forced to reflect upon the inadequacy of my attempts to interpret the secret of his strength and charm. The epithets which continually rise to our lips in speaking of him--radiant, resplendent, swift, keen, changeful, flashing, magical--carry no real notion of the marvellous and subtle spirit, that animates his comedy with life peculiar to itself. In dealing with no other poet is the critic or historian so powerless. No other work of art leaves so incommunicable an impression on the mind of the student. As for my words about Aristophanes, they are "sound and fury signifying nothing:" to be known, he must be read with admiration and delight. But those who have submitted themselves to the influence of his genius will understand what I mean when, in conclusion, I say that, with Plato and Aristophanes for guides, we can to some extent reconstruct the life of the Athenians, animate the statues of Myron and Lysippus, and see the aisles of the Parthenon or the benches of the Pnyx crowded with real human beings. Plato introduces us to the graver and more elegant side of Attic life, to the #kalokagathoi# and #charientes#, to men of sober tastes and good birth and exquisite breeding. Aristophanes acquaints us with men of pleasure, vulgar and uneducated characters, haunters of the law courts and the market-place and the assembly. From Plato we learn what occupied philosophers and people of distinction. Aristophanes tells us the popular jokes at Athens, how the political and military edicts recorded by Thucydides were familiarly discussed, how people slept and walked and dressed and dined. In Plato's Dialogues the fine Greek intellect is shown to us trained and tutored into exquisite forms of elevated culture. In Aristophanes, though art even more consummate has been used, we see the same refined intellect running riot and disporting itself with the flexibility of untamable youth. By Plato we are taught how dignified and humane the Greeks could be, by Aristophanes how versatile and human they were.

FOOTNOTES:

[114] It is almost impossible to translate this word, which will frequently recur in the essay, and which seems to depend for its force upon the conception of the satiric spirit, as that which "stets vernichtet," the Mephistophilistic "verneinender Geist."

[115] Since this chapter was written, Mr. Browning's interesting piece of criticism in verse, _Aristophanes' Apology_, containing a most clever caricature of Aristophanes, and a no less clever defence of Euripides, has appeared. I do not see any reason to alter the view expressed above concerning Greek Comedy.

[116] See below, chap. xix.

[117] As a minor instance of these sudden transitions from the touching to the absurd, take Charon's speech (_Frogs_, 185):

#tis eis anapaulas ek kakôn kai pragmatôn?
tis eis to Lêthês pedion, ê 's onou pokas,
ê 's kerberious, ê 's korakas, ê 'pi Tainaron.#

[118] This epithet contains the gist of the objection often brought against Aristophanes, that he assisted the demoralization which he denounced. If he did so, it was not by his grossness and indelicacy, but by his subtilty and refinement and audacity of universal criticism. The sceptical aqua-fortis of his age is as strong in Aristophanes as in Euripides.

[119]

#aenaoi Nephelai,
arthômen phanerai droseran physin euagêton,
patros ap' Ôkeanou baryacheos
hypsêlôn oreôn koryphas epi
dendrokomous, hina
têlephaneis skopias aphorômetha,
karpous t' ardomenan hieran chthona,
kai potamôn zatheôn keladêmata,
kai ponton keladonta barybromon;
omma gar aitheros akamaton selageitai
marmareais en augais.
all' aposeisamenoi nephos ombrion
athanatas ideas epidômetha
têleskopôi ommati gaian.#

_Clouds_, 275.

[120] Mnesilochus's criticism reminds us of Persius:

#hôs hêdu to melos ô potniai Genetyllides,
kai thêlydriôdes kai kateglôtismenon
kai mandalôton, hôst' emou g' akroômenou
hypo tên hedran autên hypêlthe gargalos.#

_Thesm._ 130.

[121] One of the most interesting chapters in Greek history still remains to be written. It should deal in detail with the legal and domestic position of free women at Athens, with the relation of their sons and husbands to Hetairai, and with the whole associated subject of paiderastia. Since this essay on Aristophanes was first published, Mr. Mahaffy has done much in his excellent book on _Social Life in Greece_ towards clearing up our views upon these matters. But the topic still requires a fuller and more scientific handling. Mr. Mahaffy is particularly felicitous in marking the distinctions of the Herodotean, Thucydidean, and Euripidean estimates of women, in bringing into prominence the _Oeconomicus_ of Xenophon, and in laying stress upon the warfare of opinion which raged at Athens between conservatives of the Periclean tradition, represented by Aristophanes, and innovators, represented in poetry by Euripides, in philosophy by Plato. I cordially agree with him in his remark that "in estimating women at this time, the Alcestis and Macaria of Euripides are too high, and the women of Aristophanes are too low" (_Social Greece_, 2d ed. p. 228). The great difficulty which must have been felt by all thoughtful students of Greek literature is how to reconcile the high ideals of female character presented by the Attic tragedians with the contemptuous silence of Thucydides, with the verdict of Plato upon women-lovers as compared with boy-lovers, with the ribaldry allowed to comic poets, and with the comparative absence of female portraits in the biographies of great Athenians composed by Plutarch.