_ARISTOPHANES._
Heine's Critique on Aristophanes.--Aristophanes as
a Poet of the Fancy.--The Nature of his Comic
Grossness.--Greek Comedy in its Relation to the Worship
of Dionysus.--Greek Acceptance of the Animal Conditions
of Humanity.--His Burlesque, Parody, Southern Sense
of Fun.--Aristophanes and Menander.--His Greatness as
a Poet.--Glimpses of Pathos.--His Conservatism and
Serious Aim.--Socrates, Agathon, Euripides.--German
Critics of Aristophanes.--Ancient and Modern
Comedy.--The _Birds_.--The _Clouds_.--Greek Youth
and Education.--The Allegories of Aristophanes.--The
_Thesmophoriazusæ_.--Aristophanes and Plato.
"A deep idea of world-destruction (_Weltvernichtungsidee_[114]) lies
at the root of every Aristophanic comedy, and, like a fantastically
ironical magic tree, springs up in it with blooming ornament of
thoughts, with singing nightingales, and climbing, chattering apes."
This is a sentence translated from the German of Heinrich Heine, who,
of all poets, was the one best fitted to appreciate the depth of
Aristophanes, to pierce beneath his smiling comic mask, and to read
the underlying Weltvernichtungsidee with what he calls its "jubilee of
death and fireworks of annihilation." Perhaps, as is common with German
writers of imagination, Heine pushes his point too far, and insists
with too much force upon the "jubilee of death," "the fireworks of
annihilation."
The strong wine of his own paradox intoxicates his judgment, and his
taste is somewhat perverted by the Northern tendency to brood upon the
more fantastic aspects of his subject. It is not so much Aristophanes
himself whom Heine sees, as Aristophanes reflected in the magic mirror
of his own melancholy and ironical fancy. Yet, after making these
deductions, the criticism I have quoted seems to me to be the proper
preface to all serious study of the greatest comic poet of the world.
It strikes the true key-note, and tunes our apprehension to the right
pitch; for, in approaching Aristophanes, we must divest our minds of
all the ordinary canons and definitions of comedy: we must forget what
we have learned from Plautus and Terence, from Molière and Jonson. No
modern poet, except perhaps Shakespeare and Calderon in parts, will
help us to understand him. We must not expect to find the gist of
Aristophanes in vivid portraits of character, in situations borrowed
from every-day life, in witty dialogues, in carefully constructed plots
arriving at felicitous conclusions. All these elements, indeed, he
has; but these are not the main points of his art. His plays are not
comedies in the sense in which we use the word, but scenic allegories,
Titanic farces in which the whole creation is turned upside down;
transcendental travesties, enormous orgies of wild fancy and unbridled
imagination; Dionysiac dances in which tears are mingled with laughter,
and fire with wine; Choruses that, underneath their oceanic merriment
of leaping waves, hide silent deeps of unstirred thought. If Coleridge
was justified in claiming the German word _Lustspiel_ for the so-called
comedies of Shakespeare, we have a far greater right to appropriate
this wide and pregnant title to the plays of Aristophanes. The brazen
mask which crowns his theatre smiles indeed broadly, serenely, as if
its mirth embraced the universe; but its hollow eye-sockets suggest
infinite possibilities of profoundest irony. Buffoonery carried to the
point of paradox, wisdom disguised as insanity, and gayety concealing
the whole sum of human disappointment, sorrow, and disgust, seem
ready to escape from its open but rigid lips, which are moulded to a
proud, perpetual laughter. It is a laughter which spares neither God
nor man--which climbs Olympus only to drag down the immortals to its
scorn, and trails the pall of august humanity in the mire; but which,
amid its mockery and blasphemy, seems everlastingly asserting, as by
paradox, that reverence of the soul which bends our knees to Heaven
and makes us respect our brothers. There is nothing sinister or even
serious in Aristophanes. He did not write in the sarcastic, cynical
old age of his nation or his era. He is rather the voice of its
superabundant youthfulness: his genius is like a young man sporting
in his scorn of danger with the thought of death; like Achilles, in
the sublimity of his beauty, mimicking the gestures of Thersites.
Nor, again, are his thoughts shaded down, concealed, wrapped up in
symbols. On the contrary, the very "Weltvernichtungsidee," of which
Heine speaks, leaps forth and spreads its wings beneath the full blaze
of Athenian noonday, showing a glorious face, as of sculptured marble,
and a comely person unashamed. It is not the morbid manifestation of
sour secretions and unnatural juices, but the healthy product of keen
vitality and perfectly harmonious functions. Into the clear light
his paradoxes, and his irony, and his unblushing satire spring like
song-birds rejoicing in their flight.
Then, again, how miraculously beautiful are "the blooming ornament of
thoughts," "the nightingales and climbing apes," of which we spoke! No
poet--not even Shelley--has exceeded the Choruses of the _Birds_ and
_Clouds_ in swiftness, radiance, and condensed imagination. Shakespeare
alone, in his _Midsummer-Night's Dream_ and the _Tempest_; or Calderon,
in some of his allegorical dramas, carries us away into the same
enchanted land, where the air is purer and the skies seem larger than
in our world; where the stars burn with treble lustre, and where the
flowers harbor visible spirits--elfs and Ariels clinging to the
branches, and dazzling fireflies tangled in the meadow-grass beneath
our feet. Nor is it only by this unearthly splendor of visionary
loveliness that Aristophanes attracts us. Beauty of a more mundane and
sensual sort is his. Multitudes of brilliant ever-changing figures fill
the scene; and here and there we find a landscape or a piece of music
and moonlight glowing with the presence of the vintage god. Bacchic
processions of young men and maidens move before us, tossing inspired
heads wreathed with jasmine flowers and wet with wine. The Mystæ in the
meadows of Elysium dance their rounds with the clash of cymbals and
with madly twinkling snow-white feet. We catch glimpses at intervals
of Athenian banquets, of midnight serenades, of the palæstra with its
crowd of athletes, of the Panathenaic festival as Pheidias carved it,
of all the busy rhythmic colored life of Greece.
The difficulty of treating Aristophanes in an essay is twofold. There
are first of all those obstacles which every writer on so old a subject
has to meet. Aristophanes, like all Greek poets, has been subjected
to prolonged and most minute criticism. He has formed a part of
classical education for centuries, and certain views about his poetry,
substantially correct, have become a fixed element in our literary
consciousness. Thus every fresh writer on the old comedy of Athens must
take a good deal of knowledge for granted in his readers--but what,
and how much, he hardly knows. He may expect them to be acquainted
with the details furnished by scholars like Donaldson about the times
at which comedies were exhibited, the manner of their presentation on
the stage, and the change from the old to the middle and new periods.
He may suppose that they will know that Aristophanes stood in the
same relation to Cratinus as Sophocles to Æschylus; that the _Clouds_
had not so much to do with the condemnation of Socrates as some of
the later Greek gossips attempted to make out; that Aristophanes was
conservative in politics, philosophy, and literature, vehemently
opposing the demagogues, the sophists, and Euripides. Again, he may,
or rather he must, avoid the ground which has been so well trodden
by Schlegel, Müller, and Mitchell, in their familiar criticisms of
Aristophanes; and he may content himself with a passing allusion to
Grote's discussion of the _Clouds_. But though, from this point of
view, Aristophanes is almost stale from having been so much written
about and talked about and alluded to--though in fact there is a _prima
facie_ obligation imposed on every one who makes his plays the subject
of fresh criticism to pretend at least to some originality of view or
statement--still Aristophanes has never yet been fairly dealt with
or submitted to really dispassionate consideration. Thus he shares,
in common with all poets of antiquity, the disabilities of being
hackneyed, while he has the peculiar and private disability of never
having been really appreciated at his worth except by a few scholars
and enthusiastic poets. The reason for this want of intelligence in
the case of Aristophanes is not hard to see. First of all, his plays
are very difficult. Their allusions require much learned illustration.
Their vocabulary is copious and rare. So that none but accomplished
Grecians or devoted students of literature can hope to read him with
much pleasure to themselves. In a translation his special excellence
is almost unrecognizable. Next--and this is the real reason why
Aristophanes has been unfairly dealt with, as well as the source of
the second class of difficulties which meet his interpreters--it is
hard for the modern Christian world to tolerate his freedom of speech
and coarseness. Of all the Greeks, essentially a nude nation, he is
the most naked--the most audacious in his revelation of all that
human nature is supposed to seek to hide. The repugnance felt for his
ironical _insouciance_ and for his profound indelicacy has prevented us
from properly valuing his poetry. Critics begin their panegyrics of him
with apologies; they lift their skirts and tread delicately, passing
over his broadest humor _sicco pede_, picking their way among his
heterogeneous images, winking and blinking, hesitating and condoning,
omitting a passage here, attempting to soften an allusion there, until
the real Aristophanes has almost disappeared. Yet there is no doubt
that this way of dealing with our poet will not do. The time has come
at which any writer on Greek literature, if not content to pass by
Aristophanes in silence, must view him as he is, and casting aside for
a moment at least the veil of modern propriety, must be prepared to
admit that this great comic genius was "far too naked to be shamed."
So important is this point in the whole of its bearing upon
Aristophanes that I may perhaps be allowed to explain the peculiar
position which he occupies, and, without seeking to offer any
exculpation for what offends us in the moral sensibilities of the
Greeks, to show how such a product as the comedy of Aristophanes took
root and grew in Athens. His plays, I have already said, are not
comedies in the modern sense, but Lustspiele--fantastic entertainments,
debauches of the reason and imagination. The poet, when he composed
them, knew that he was writing for an audience of Greeks, inebriated
with the worship of the vintage god, ivy-crowned, and thrilling to
the sound of orgiastic flutes. Therefore, we who read him in the cool
shades of modern Protestantism, excited by no Dionysiac rites, forced
to mine and quarry at his jests with grammar, lexicon, and commentary,
unable, except by the exercise of the historical imagination, to
conceive of a whole nation agreeing to honor its god by frantic
license, must endeavor to check our natural indignation, and by no
means to expect from Aristophanes such views of life as are consistent
with our sober mood. We cannot, indeed, exactly apply to the case of
Aristophanes those clever sophistries by which Charles Lamb defended
the comic poets of our Restoration, when he said that they had created
an unreal world, and that, allowing for their fictitious circumstances,
the perverse morality of their plays was not only pardonable, but
even necessary. Yet it is true that his audacious immodesty forms a
part of that Weltvernichtungsidee, of that total upturn and Titanic
revolution in the universe which he affects; and so far we may plead
in his defence, and in the defence of the Athenian spectators, that
his comedies were consciously exaggerated in their coarseness, and
that beyond the limits of the Dionysiac festival their jokes would
not have been tolerated. To use a metaphor, his plays were offered as
a sacrifice upon the thymelé or orchestral altar of that Bacchus who
was sire by Aphrodite of Priapus: this potent deity protected them;
and the poet, as his true and loyal priest, was bound, in return for
such protection, to represent the universe at large as conquered by
the madness of intoxication, beauty, and desire. Thus the Aristophanic
comedies are in one sense a radiant and pompous show, by which the
genius of the Greek race chose, as it were in bravado, to celebrate an
apotheosis of the animal functions of humanity; and from this point of
view we may fairly accept them as visions, Dionysiac day-dreams, from
which the nation woke and rose and went about its business soberly,
until the Bacchic flutes were heard again another year.
On the religious origin of Greek comedy some words may perhaps be
reckoned not out of place in this connection. It has frequently been
pointed out to what a great extent the character of the Aristophanic
comedy was determined by its sacred nature, and by the peculiar
condition of semi-religious license which prevailed at Athens during
the celebration of the festival of Bacchus. We know that much is
tolerated in a Roman or Venetian carnival which would not be condoned
at other seasons of the year. Yet the Italian carnival, in its palmiest
days, must have offered but a very poor and frigid picture of what
took place in Athens at the Dionysia, nor was the expression of the
crudest sensuality ever thought agreeable to any modern saint. That the
Greeks most innocently and simply wished to prove their piety by these
excesses is quite clear. Aristophanes himself, in the _Acharnians_,
gives us an example of the primitive phallic hymn, which formed the
nucleus of comedy in its rudest stage. The refrain of #phalês, hetaire
Bakchiou, xynkôme, nykteroplanête, moiche# sufficiently indicates
its nature. Again, the Choruses of the Mystæ in the _Frogs_ furnish
a still more brilliant example of the interminglement of debauchery
with a spirit of true piety, of sensual pleasure with pure-souled
participation in divine bliss. Their hymns to Iacchus and Demeter
alternate between the holiest strains of praise and the most scurrilous
satire. At one time they chant the delights of the meadows blooming
with the rose; at another they raise cries of jubilant intoxication
and fierce frenzy. In the same breath with the utterance of sensual
passion they warn all profane persons and impure livers to avoid their
rites, and boast that for them alone the light of heaven is gladsome
who have forsworn impiety and preserved the justice due to friends
and strangers. We must imagine that this phallic ecstasy, if we may
so name it, had become, as it were, organized and reduced to system
in the Aristophanic Lustspiel. It permeates and gives a flavor to the
comic style long after it has been absorbed and superseded by the
weightier interests of developed art. This ecstasy implied a profound
sympathy with nature in her large and perpetual reproductiveness, a
mysterious sense of the sexuality which pulses in all members of the
universe and reaches consciousness in man. It encouraged a momentary
subordination of the will and intellect and nobler feelings to the
animal propensities, prompting the same race which had produced the
sculptures of the Parthenon, the tragedies of Æschylus, the deeds of
Pericles and Leonidas, the self-control of Socrates, the thought of
Plato, to throw aside its royal mantle of supreme humanity, and to
proclaim in a gigantic work of art the irreconcilable incongruity which
exists between the physical nature and the spirit of the man, when
either side of the antithesis is isolated for exclusive contemplation.
We need not here point out how far removed was the phallic ecstasy from
any prurient delight in licentious details, or from the scientific
analysis of passions. Nor, on the other hand, need we indicate the vein
of a similar extravagant enthusiasm in Oriental poetry. It is enough to
remember that it existed latent in all the comic dramas of the earlier
period, throbbing through them as the _sève de la jeunesse_ palpitates
in youthful limbs and adds a glow and glory to the inconsiderate or
unseemly acts of an Alcibiades or Antony. Christianity, by introducing
a new conception of the physical relations of humanity, by regarding
the body as the temple of the spirit, utterly rejected and repudiated
this delirium of the senses, this voluntary acceptance of merely
animal conditions. Christianity taught mankind, what the Greeks had
never learned, that it is our highest duty to be at discord with the
universe upon this point. Man, whose subtle nature might be compared
to a many-stringed instrument, is bidden to restrain the resonance of
those chords which do not thrill in unison with purely spiritual and
celestial harmonies. Hence the theories of celibacy and asceticism,
and of the sinfulness of carnal pleasure, which are wholly alien to
Greek moral and religious notions. Never since the age of Athenian
splendor has a rational and highly civilized nation dared to express
by any solemn act its sense of union with merely physical nature.
Aristophanes is therefore the poet of a past age, the "hierophant of a
now unapprehended mystery," the unique remaining example of an almost
unlimited genius set apart and consecrated to a cultus which subsequent
civilization has determined to annihilate. The only age which offers
anything like a parallel to the Athenian era of Aristophanes is that of
the Italian Renaissance. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, at
Venice, Florence, and Rome, it seemed as if the phallic ecstasy might
possibly revive, as if the animal nature of man might again be deified,
in sentiment at least, and as if the highest arts might stoop once
more to interpret and to consecrate the poetry of the senses. But the
conscience of the world was changed; and this could no longer be. The
image of Christ crowned with thorns had passed across the centuries;
hopes undreamed of by the Greeks had aroused a new spirit in the soul
of man, and had forced him in spite of inclination to lift his eyes
from earth to heaven. Over the joys of the flesh, which were connected
with a future doom of pain unending and disgrace, was shed a hue of
gloom and horror. Conception was looked upon as sin, birth as disaster.
It was even doubted whether for any but for virgins, except by some
special privilege of election, salvation could be hoped. Therefore,
while the Greeks had been innocent in their serene unconsciousness of
sin or shame, the extravagances of the Renaissance were guilty, turbid,
and morbid, because they were committed defiantly, in open reprobacy,
in scorn of the acknowledged law. What was at worst bestial in the
Greeks has become devilish in the Renaissance. How different from a
true Greek is Benvenuto Cellini: how unlike the monsters even of Greek
mythic story is Francesco Cenci: how far more awful in his criminality
is the Borgia than any despot of Greek colony or island! I have been
somewhat led astray from the point in view, which was to prove that
the comedies of Aristophanes embody a peculiar and temporary, though
recurring and recognized, phase of Greek feeling--that they owe their
license in a great measure to their religious origin and to the
enthusiasm of the Bacchic ecstasy.
But what has just been said about the difference between Athenian
Greece and the Italian Renaissance will show that Aristophanes has a
still more solid ground of defence in the fact that he was thoroughly
in harmony with the moral sense of his age and nation, and that the
Bacchic license was only an exaggeration of more ordinary habits, both
of thought and action. It must be acknowledged that the Greeks were
devoid of what we call shame and delicacy in respect of their bodies.
It was only in the extreme old age of the Greek race, and under the
dominion of Oriental mysticism, that the Alexandrian Plotinus was heard
to exclaim that he blushed because he had a body. The true Greeks, on
the contrary, were proud of the body, loved to display their physical
perfections, felt no shame of any physical needs, were not degraded
by the exercise of any animal function, nay poetized the pleasures
of the flesh. Simonides, in his lines on happiness, prays first for
health and next for beauty; and a thousand passages might be quoted
to prove how naturally and sincerely the Greeks reckoned physical
beauty among the chief goods of life, and how freely they exhibited it
in all its splendor. As a slight indication of the popular feeling,
we might quote the reproof for effeminacy which Aristophanes utters
against the young men who thought it necessary to appear clothed at the
Panathenaic festival; from which it is clear that the Greek conscience
connected nudity with purity. The immense value attached to physical
beauty is evident even from their military history--from the record,
for instance, of Callicrates among the heroes of Platæa, simply because
he was the fairest of the Greeks who fought that day. Again, Herodotus
tells of one Philippus, who joined in the expedition of Dorieus against
Eryx, and who, being slain and stripped by the people of Segeste, was
taken up by his foes and nobly buried, and thereafter worshipped as
a hero on account of his exceeding beauty. The influence which the
sight of beauty exercised over the gravest of the Greeks is proved by
the story of Phryne before the Areopagus, and by what Plato tells of
Socrates at the beginning of the _Charmides_. How it could electrify
a nation assembled in the theatre is shown by Plutarch's story of the
slave whom Nicias set free for winning the applause of all Athens when
acting Dionysus, and by Xenophon's tale about another Dorieus whom the
Athenians, though he was their deadly foe, released ransomless and
scathless, after he had been captured and sent to Attica, because he
was a very goodly man. Nor was it the sense of beauty only, or the open
exhibition of the person, which marked the Greeks. Besides this, and
perhaps flowing from it, we find in them an extraordinary callousness
with regard to many things which we think shocking and degrading in the
last degree. The mere fact that Alcibiades, while a minister of the
Athenian people, could have told the tales of his youth, recorded in
Plato's Banquet, or that grave men could have contended without reserve
for the favor of distinguished courtesans, proves that the Athenian
public was ready to accept whatever Aristophanes might set before
them--not to take his jokes scornfully, as a Roman patron trifled with
the _facetiæ_ of his _Græculus esuriens_, but, while enjoying them, to
respect their author.
Nor is Aristophanes without another solid ground of defence on the
score of sincerity and healthiness. In his immodesty there is nothing
morbid, though it is expressed more crudely than suits the moral
dignity of man. Aristophanes is never prurient, never in bad taste or
vulgar. He has none of the obscenity which revolts us in Swift, who
uses filth in order to degrade and violate our feelings; none of the
nastiness of Molière or Pope, whose courtly and polished treatment
of disgusting subjects is a disgrace to literature; none of the
coarseness of Ben Jonson; none of the far more indecent innuendo which
contaminates the writings of humorists like Sterne and satirists like
Voltaire, who seem always trying, childishly or apishly, to tamper
with forbidden things. Aristophanes accepts licentiousness as a fact
which needs no apology: he does not, as the moderns do, mingle it with
sentiment, or indulge in it on the sly. He has no _polissonnerie_: the
_vice égrillard_ of the French (from whom we are obliged to borrow
these phrases) is unknown to him. His license is large, serene,
sane, statuesque, self-approved. His sensuality is nonchalant and
natural--so utterly devoid of shame, so thoroughly at home and well
contented with itself, that it has no perturbation, no defiance, no
mysterious attractiveness. Besides, he is ironical; his #apepsôlêmenoi#
and #euryprôktoi# promenade in noonday, and get laughed at, instead
of being stoned and hooted down. About the audacious scene between
Kinesias and Murrhine, in the _Lysistrata_, there is no Aretine
hircosity. It is merely comic--a farcical incident, selected, not
for the rankness of its details, but for its dramatic capabilities.
The same may be said about the termination of the _Thesmophoriazusæ_
and the scene in the _Ecclesiazusæ_, which so vividly illustrates
the working of one law in the new commonwealth. So innocent in his
unconsciousness is Aristophanes that he rarely condescends even
to satirize the sensual vices. The lines about Ariphrades in the
_Knights_, however, are an instance of his having done this with
more than the pungency of Martial, and it must be admitted that his
pictures of the drunkenness and incontinence of the Athenian women
have something Swiftish in their brutal sarcasm. If we are to seek for
an approximation to Aristophanic humor, we shall find it perhaps in
Rabelais. Rabelais exhibits a similar disregard for decency, combining
the same depth of purpose and largeness of insight with the same
coarse fun. But in Aristophanes there is nothing quite grotesque and
homely, whereas Rabelais is full of these qualities. Even the opening
of the _Peace_, fantastic as it is in absurdity, does not touch the
note of grossness peculiar to French Pantagruelism. Aristophanes is
always Greek, while Rabelais inherits the mediæval spirit. In reading
Aristophanes we seem to have the serene skies of Attica above our
heads; the columns of the Propylæa and the Parthenon look down on us;
noble shapes of youths and maidens are crowding sacred marble steps;
below, upon the mirror of the sea, shine Salamis and Ægina; and far
off, in hazy distance, rise Peloponnesian hills. With these pictures
of the fancy his comedy harmonizes. But Rabelais carries us away to
Gothic courts and monkish libraries; we fill his margin with etchings
in the style of Gustave Doré. What has been said of Rabelais applies
with even greater force to Hogarth, whose absolute sincerity is as
great as that of Aristophanes, but who is never light and careless. His
coarseness is the product of a coarse nature, of coarse manners, of
a period of national coarseness. We tolerate it because of the moral
earnestness beneath: the artist is striving diligently to teach us by
warning us of vice. This is hardly ever the case with Aristophanes.
When he is coarse, we pardon him for very different reasons. In his
wilful degradation of humanity to the level of animals we recognize a
portion of the Weltvernichtungsidee. In the intellectual arrogance of
the Athenian prime a poet could afford thus to turn the world upside
down. But those who cannot subscribe to the following dictum of Taine,
which is very applicable to Aristophanes--"Elevées à cette énormité et
savourées avec cette insouciance, les fonctions corporelles deviennent
poétiques"--those who
Wink and shut their apprehension up
From common-sense of what men were and are,
Who would not know what men must be--
will need to "hurry amain" from the mask of moral anarchy which the
great comedian displays. With these remarks I may finally dismiss what
has to be said about the chief disability under which Aristophanes
labors as a poet.[115]
For the enjoyment of Aristophanic fun a sort of Southern childishness
and swiftness of gleeful apprehension is required. It does not
shine so much in its pure wit as in its overflowing humor and in
the inexhaustible fertility of ludicrous devices by which laughter
is excited. The ascent of Trugaios to heaven upon the dung-beetle's
back, and the hauling of Peace from her well in the _Eirene_, or the
wine-skin dressed up like a baby in the _Thesmophoriazusæ_, may be
mentioned as instances of this broad but somewhat peculiar drollery.
Burlesquing the gods was always a capital resource of the comic poets.
If we in the nineteenth century can find any amusement whatever in
Byron's or Burnand's travesties of Olympus, how exquisitely absurd
to an Athenian mob must have been the figures of Prometheus under
an umbrella, Herakles the glutton, Hermes and Æacus the household
slaves, Bacchus the young fop, and Iris the soubrette. The puns of
Aristophanes, for the most part, are very bad, but the parodies are
excellent. Then the surprises (#para prodokian#), both of language
and of incident, with which his comedies abound, the broad and genial
caricatures which are so largely traced and carried out in detail with
such force, the brilliant descriptions of familiar things seen from odd
or unexpected points of view, and, lastly, the enormous quantity of
mirth-producing matter which the poet squanders with the prodigality
of conscious omnipotence, all contribute to heighten the comic effect
of Aristophanes. Perhaps the most intelligible piece of fun, in the
modern sense of the word, is the last scene in the _Thesmophoriazusæ_,
which owes its effect to parody and caricature more than to allusions
which are hard to seize. A great deal of the fun of Aristophanes must
have depended upon local and personal peculiarities which we cannot
understand: the constant references to the effeminate Cleisthenes, the
skinflint Pauson, miserly Patrocles, cowardly Cleonymus, Execestides
the alien, Agyrrhius the upstart, make us yawn because we cannot catch
the exact point of the jests against them. Indeed, as Schlegel has
said, "we may boldly affirm that, notwithstanding all the explanations
which have come down to us--notwithstanding the accumulation of
learning which has been spent upon it, one half of the wit of
Aristophanes is altogether lost to the moderns."
Having dismissed these preliminary considerations, we may now ask what
has caused the comedy of Aristophanes to triumph over the obstacles to
its acceptance. Why have his plays been transmitted to posterity when
those of Eupolis and Cratinus have perished, and when only scattered
lines from the eight hundred comedies of the middle period read by
Athenæus have survived destruction? No one has asked of Aristophanes
the question which the Alexandrian critic put to Menander: "Oh,
Nature and Menander, which of you copied the other?" Yet Menander is
scarcely more to us than the memory of departed greatness,[116] or at
best an echo sounding somewhat faintly from the Roman theatre, while
Aristophanes survives among the most highly cherished monuments of
antiquity. The answer to this question is, no doubt, that Aristophanes
was more worth preservation than his predecessors or successors.
It is wiser to have confidence in the ultimate good taste and
conservative instinct of humanity than to accept Bacon's half-ironical,
half-irritable saying, that the stream of time lets every solid
substance sink, and carries down the froth and scum upon its surface.
As far, at least, as it is possible to form a judgment, we may be
pretty certain that in the province of the highest art and of the
deepest thought we possess the greater portion of those works which
the ancients themselves prized highly; indeed, we may conjecture that
had the great libraries of Alexandria and Byzantium been transmitted
to us entire, the pure metal would not very greatly have exceeded in
bulk what we now possess, but would have been buried beneath masses
of inferior matter from which centuries would have scarcely sufficed
to disengage it. Aristophanes was preserved in his integrity, we need
not doubt, because he shone forth as a _poet_ transcendent for his
splendor even among the most brilliant of Attic playwrights. Cratinus
may have equalled or surpassed him in keen satire: Eupolis may have
rivalled him in exquisite artistic structure; but Aristophanes must
have eclipsed them, not merely by uniting their qualities successfully,
but also by the exhibition of some diviner quality, some higher
spiritual afflatus. If we analyze his art, we find that he combines the
breadth of humor, which I have already sought to characterize, with the
utmost versatility and force of intellect, with the power of grasping
his subjects under all their bearings, with extraordinary depth of
masculine good sense, with inexhaustible argumentative resources, and
with a marvellous hold on personalities. Yet all these qualities,
essential to a comic poet who pretended also to be the public censor
of politics and morals, would not have sufficed to immortalize him
had he not been essentially a poet--a poet in what we are apt to call
the modern sense of the word--a poet, that is to say, endowed with
original intuitions into nature, and with the faculty of presenting to
our minds the most varied thoughts and feelings in language uniformly
beautiful, as the creatures of an exuberant and self-swayed fancy.
Aristophanes is a poet as Shelley or Ariosto or Shakespeare is a
poet, far more than as Sophocles or Pindar or Lucretius is a poet. In
spite of his profound art, we seem to hear him uttering "his native
wood-notes wild." The subordination of the fancy to the fixed aims
of the reason, which characterizes classical poetry, is not at first
sight striking in Aristophanes; but he splendidly exhibits the wealth,
luxuriance, variety, and subtlety of the fancy working with the reason,
and sometimes superseding it, which we recognize in the greatest modern
poets. If we seek to define the peculiar qualities of his poetic
power, we are led to results not easily expressed, because all general
critical conclusions are barren and devoid of force when worded,
but which may perhaps be stated and accepted as the text for future
illustration.
The poetry of Aristophanes is always swift and splendid. We watch
its brilliant course as we might watch the flight of a strong, rapid
bird, whose plumage glitters by moments in the light of the sun; for,
to insist upon the metaphor, the dazzling radiance of his fancy only
shines at intervals, capriciously, with fitful flashes, coruscating
suddenly and dying out again. It is as if the neck alone and a portion
of the feathers of the soaring bird were flecked with gold and crimson
grain, so that a turn of the body or a fluttering of the pinions is
enough to bring the partial splendor into light or cast it into shadow.
Aristophanes passes by abrupt transitions from the coarsest or most
simply witty dialogue to passages of pure and plaintive song; he quits
his fiercest satire for refreshing strains of lark-like heaven-aspiring
melody. These, again, he interrupts with sudden ruthlessness, breaking
the melody in the middle of a bar, and dropping the unfinished stanza.
He seems shy of giving his poetic impulse free rein, and prefers to
tantalize[117] us with imperfect specimens of what he might achieve; so
that his splendor is like that of northern streamers in its lambency,
though swift and piercing as forked lightnings in its intensity. Even
his most impassioned and sustained flights of imagination are broken
by digressions into satire, fantastic merriment, or parody, by which
the more dull-witted Athenians must have been sorely puzzled in their
inability to decide on the serious or playful purpose of the poet.
Perhaps the most splendid passages of true poetry in Aristophanes are
the choruses of the initiated in the _Frogs_, the Chorus of the Clouds
before they appear upon the stage, the invitation to the nightingale,
and the parabasis of the Birds, the speech of Dikaios Logos in the
_Clouds_, some of the praises of rustic life in the _Peace_, the
serenade (notwithstanding its coarse satire) in the _Ecclesiazusæ_,
and the songs of Spartan and Athenian maidens in the _Lysistrata_.
The charm of these marvellous lyrical episodes consists in their
perfect simplicity and freedom. They seem to be poured forth as
"profuse strains of unpremeditated art" from the fulness of the poet's
soul. Their language is elastic, changeful, finely tempered, fitting
the delicate thought like a veil of woven air. It has no Pindaric
involution, no Æschylean pompousness, no studied Sophoclean subtlety,
no Euripidean _concetti_. It is always bright and Attic, sparkling
like the many-twinkling laughter of the breezy sea, or like the light
of morning upon rain-washed olive-branches. But this poetry is never
very deep or passionate. It cannot stir us with the intensity of
Sappho, with the fire and madness of the highest inspiration. Indeed,
the conditions of comedy precluded Aristophanes, even had he desired
it, which we have no reason to suspect, from attempting the more
august movements of lyric poetry. The peculiar glories of his style
are its untutored beauties, the improvised perfection and unerring
exactitude of natural expression, for which it is unparalleled by that
of any other Greek poet. In her most delightful moments the muse of
Aristophanes suggests an almost plaintive pathos, as if behind the
comic mask there were a thinking, feeling human soul, as if the very
uproar of the Bacchic merriment implied some after-thought of sadness.
A detailed examination of the structure of the comedies would be the
best illustration of these remarks. At present it will be enough to
bring forward two examples of the tender melodies which may at times
be overheard in pauses of the wild Aristophanic symphony. The first of
these is the well-known Welcome to the Nightingale, sung by the Chorus
before their parabasis:
#ô philê, ô xouthê, ô
philtaton orneôn,
pantôn xynnome tôn emôn
hymnôn xyntroph' aêdoi;
êlthes, êlthes, ôphthês,
hêdyn phthongon emoi pherous'?
all' ô kalliboan krekous'
aulon phthegmasin êrinois,
archou tôn anapaistôn.#
With what a fluent caressing fulness one word succeeds another here!
How each expresses love and joy! Remember, too, that all the birds
are singing together, and that the wild throat of their playfellow,
the nightingale, is ready to return the welcome with its throbbing
song of May-time and young summer. Take another poetic touch, brief
and unobtrusive, yet painting a perfect picture with few strokes, and
transfusing it with the spirit of the scene imagined:
#all' anamnêsthentes, ôndres,
tês diaitês tês palaias,
hên pareich' hautê poth' hêmin,
tôn te palasiôn ekeinôn,
tôn te sykôn, tôn te myrtôn,
tês trygos te tês glykeias,
tês iônias te tês pros tôi phreati,
tôn te elaôn, hôn pothoumen--#
"The violet-bed beside the well, and the olives which we long to see
again." Trugaios is reminding his fellow-villagers of the pleasures
of peace and of their country life. Those who from their recollection
of Southern scenery can summon up the picture, who know how cool and
shady are those wells, mirroring maidenhair in their black depth; how
fragrant and dewy are the beds of tangled violets; how dreamy are the
olive-trees, aerial, mistlike, robed with light, will understand the
peculiar #pothos# of these lines.
But we must not dwell too much upon the glimpses of pathetic poetry
in Aristophanes, which, after all, are but few and far between, mere
swallow-flights of song, when compared with the serious business
of his art. It is well known that the old comedy of the Athenians
performed the function of a public censorship. Starting from the
primitive comic song, in which a rude Fescennine license of what we
now call "chaffing" was allowed, and tempering its rustic jocularity
with the caustic bitterness of Archilochian satire, comedy became an
instrument for holding up to public ridicule all things of general
interest. Persons and institutions, nay, the gods themselves, are
freely laughed at. Bacchus seems to have enjoyed the jokes even when
directed against himself: #kai ho theos isôs chairei philogelôs tis
ôn# are the words of Lucian. So no one else had a right to resent
the poet's merriment when the presiding god of the festival approved
of sarcasms against his deity, and trod his own stage as a cowardly,
effeminate young profligate. This being the more serious aim of comedy,
it followed that Aristophanes always had some satiric, and in so far
didactic, purpose underlying his extravagant caricatures. What that
purpose was is too well known to need more than passing mention. From
his earliest appearance under the name of Callistratus, to the last of
his victories, Aristophanes maintained his character as an Athenian
Conservative. He came forward uniformly as a panegyrist of the old
policy of Athens, and a vehement antagonist of the new direction
taken by his nation subsequently to the Persian war. This one theme
he varied according to circumstances and convenience. In the first of
his plays--the _Daitaleis_--he attacked the profligacy and immodesty
of the rising generation, who neglected their Homer for the lessons
of the sophists, and engaged in legal quarrels. The _Acharnians_,
the _Peace_, and the _Lysistrata_ are devoted to impressing on the
Athenians the advantages of peace, and inducing them to lay aside
their enmity against Sparta. In the _Knights_, the demagogues are
attacked through the person of Cleon, with a violence of concentrated
passion that surpasses the most savage onslaughts of Archilochus. The
_Clouds_ and _Wasps_ exhibit different pictures of the insane passion
for litigation and the dishonest arts of rhetoric which prevailed at
Athens, fostered partly by the influence of sophists who professed
to teach a profitable method of public speaking, and partly by the
flattery of the demagogues. The _Birds_ is a fantastic satire upon
the Athenian habit of building castles in the air, and indulging in
extravagant dreams of conquest. In the _Ecclesiazusæ_ Aristophanes
seems bent on ridiculing the visionary Utopias of political theorists
like Plato, and also on caricaturing the social license which prevailed
in Athens, where everything, as he complains, had been tried, except
for women to appear in public like the men. In the _Thesmophoriazusæ_
and the _Frogs_ we exchange politics for literature; but in his
treatment of the latter subject, Aristophanes exhibits the same
conservative spirit. His hostility against Euripides, which is almost
as bitter as his hatred of Cleon, is founded upon the sophistical
nature of his art. Indeed, the demagogues, the sophists, and Euripides
were looked upon by him as three forms of the same poison which was
corrupting the old #êthos# of his nation. We have now indicated the
serious intention of all the plays of Aristophanes except the _Plutus_,
which is an ethical allegory conceived under a different inspiration
from that which gave the impulse to his other creative acts. Yet
it must not be forgotten that the subject-matter of these plays is
often varied: in the _Acharnians_, for example, we have a specimen of
literary criticism, while the _Lysistrata_ is aimed as much at the
follies of women as intended to set forth the advantages of peace. We
must also remember that it was the poet's purpose to keep his serious
ground-plan concealed. His comedy had to be the direct antithesis
to Greek tragedy. If it taught, it was to teach by paradox. In this
respect, Aristophanes realized a very high ideal. Preach as he may
be doing in reality, and underneath his merriment there is hardly a
passage in all his plays, if we except the pleadings of Dikaios Logos
in the _Clouds_, and the personal portions of the Parabases, in which
we catch him revealing his own earnestness. Every ordinary point of
view is so consistently ignored, and all the common relations of things
are so thoroughly reversed, that the topsy-turvy chaos which a play
of Aristophanes presents is quite harmonious. It is, in fact, madness
methodized and with a sober meaning. Perhaps we ought to seek in this
consideration the key to those problems which have occupied historians
when dealing with the Aristophanic criticism of Socrates. How, it is
always asked, could Aristophanes have been so consciously unjust to the
great moralist of Athens? If we keep in sight the intentional absurdity
of everything in one of the Aristophanic comedies, we may perhaps
understand how it was possible for the poet to travesty the friend with
whom he conversed familiarly at supper-parties. That Plato understood
the ridicule of his great master from some such point of view as this
is clear from his express recommendation of the _Clouds_ to Dionysius,
from the portrait which he draws of Aristophanes in the _Symposium_,
and from the eulogistic epigram (if that is genuine) which he composed
upon him. It is curious as a parallel that Agathon should have been
even more ignobly caricatured than Socrates at the beginning of the
_Thesmophoriazusæ_; yet we know from his own lips, as well as from the
dialogue of Plato, that Aristophanes was a friend of the tragic poet,
for he elsewhere calls him
#agathos poiêtês kai potheinos tois philois.#
The lash applied to Socrates and Agathon is scarcely less stinging
than that applied to Cleon and Euripides. Yet the fact remains that
Aristophanes was the friend of Agathon and a member of the Socratic
circle. Much of the obscurity attending the interpretation of the
_Clouds_ arises from our having lost the finer _nuances_ of Athenian
feeling respecting the persons satirized in the old comedy. _We_
do not, for example, understand Cratinus when he joins the name of
Euripides with that of his great satirist in one epithet descriptive
of the quibbling style of the day--#euripidaristophanizein#.[118] But
to return from this digression, we may observe that it was only in a
democracy that an institution unsparing of friend and foe, like the old
comedy, in which persons were openly exposed to censure and the solemn
acts of the government were called in question, could be tolerated.
Accordingly we find that the early development of comedy, after the
date of Susarion, was checked by the accession of Pisistratus to power,
and that the old comedy itself perished with the extinction of Athenian
liberty. It is only a democracy that likes to criticise itself, that
takes pride in its indifference to ridicule, and in its readiness
to acknowledge its own errors. In this respect, we English are very
democratic: we abuse ourselves and expose our own follies more than
any other nation; the press and the platform do for us, in a barren,
unæsthetic fashion, what Aristophanes did for the Athenian public.
Perhaps we may now be able to see that a middle course must be followed
between the extremes of regarding Aristophanes as an indecent parasite
pandering to the worst inclinations of the Athenian rabble, and of
looking upon him as a profound philosopher and sober patriot. The
former view is maintained by Grote, who, though he is somewhat hampered
by his pronounced championship of all the democratic institutions of
Athens, among which the comedy of Aristophanes must needs be reckoned,
yet clearly thinks that the poet was a meddling monkey, full indeed of
genius, but injurious to the order of the State and to the peace of
private persons. The latter has been advocated by the German scholars
Ranke, Bergk, and Meineke, against whom Grote has directed an able
and conclusive argument in the notes to his eighth volume. Truly, it
is absurd to pretend that Aristophanes was the prudent and far-seeing
moralist described by his German admirers. To imagine him thus would
be to falsify the whole purpose of the Athenian comic drama, and to
test its large extravagance by the narrow standard of modern morality.
We might as well fancy that Alexander was an unselfish worker in the
service of humanity as bring ourselves to see in Aristophanes the
sage of uniformly staid sobriety. Not to mention that such a notion
is at total variance with the only authentic portrait we possess of
him, in the _Symposium_ of Plato, every line of his comedies cries
out against so pedantic and priggish a calumny. For it is a calumny
thus to misrepresent the high-spirited muse of Aristophanes, with
her dishevelled hair and Coan robe of flimsiest gauze, and wild
eyes swimming in the mists of wine. She never pretends to be better
than a priestess of the midnight Bacchus and Corinthian Aphrodite,
though she believes sincerely in the inspiration of these deities.
To see in her a Vestal or a Diotima, to set the owl of Pallas on her
shoulder, and to strap the ægis round her panting breasts is a piece
of elaborate stupidity and painful impertinence which it remained for
German pedagogues to perpetrate. Yet it is equally wrong to think of
Aristophanes merely as a pernicious calumniator, who killed Socrates,
and put an ineffectual spoke in the wheel of progress. Granted that he
was more of a Merry-Andrew than a moralist, more of a #gelôtopoios#
than a #meteôroleschês#, we must surely be blind if we fail to
recognize the deep undernote of good sense and wisdom which gives
eternal value to his jests--worse than blind if we do not honor him for
valiant and unflinching service in the cause which he had recognized
as right. Nor are the enemies of Aristophanes less insensible to his
real merits as an artist than his ponderous German friends. What are we
to think of the imaginative faculties of a man who, after gazing upon
the divine splendors of the genius of Aristophanes, after tracking the
erratic flight of this most radiant poet, "with his singing robes about
him," can descend to earth and wish that he had never existed, or shake
his head and measure him by the moral standards of Quarterly Reviews
and British respectability? Alas, that from the modern world should
have evanesced all appreciation of art that is not obviously useful,
palpably didactic! If we would rightly estimate Aristophanic comedy, we
must be prepared to accept it in the classical spirit, and separating
ourselves from either sect of the Pharisees, refuse to picture its
great poets to ourselves, on the one hand as patriots _eximia morum
gravitate_, or on the other as foul slanderers and irreverent buffoons.
Far beyond and outside the plane of either standing-ground are they.
The old comedy of Athens is a work of art so tempered and so balanced
that he who would appreciate it must submit, for a moment at least, to
forego his modern advantages of improved morality and public decency
and purer taste and parliamentary courtesy, and to become--if he can
bend his moral back to that obliquity--a "merry Greek."
It is now clear that Aristophanic comedy is in the history of art
unique--the product of peculiar and unrepeated circumstances. The
essential differences between it and modern comedy are manifold.
Modern comedy partakes of the tragic spirit; it has a serious purpose,
acknowledged by the poet; a lesson is generally taught in its
catastrophe; it is fond of poetical justice. Aristophanic comedy, as
we have seen, whatever may be its purpose, is always ludicrous to the
spectators and to itself. _Tartuffe_, _A New Way to Pay Old Debts_,
and _Volpone_ are tragedies without bloodshed: you only laugh at them
incidentally. The _Clouds_, the _Knights_, and the _Frogs_ excite
inevitable laughter. Nor is this difference manifest only in the matter
and spirit of the two comedies: it expresses itself externally in their
several forms. The plays of Aristophanes, upon the stage, must have
been like our pantomimes, or rather, like our operas. If we wish to
form a tolerable notion of the appearance of an Aristophanic comedy,
we cannot do better than keep in mind the _Flauto Magico_ of Mozart.
Had Mozart received a good translation of the _Birds_ instead of the
wretched libretto of the _Zauberflöte_, what a really magic drama he
might have produced! Even as it is, with the miserable materials he
had to work upon, the master musician has given us an Aristophanic
specimen of the ludicrous passing by abrupt but delicate transitions to
the serious, of parody and irony playing in and out at hide-and-seek,
of pathos lurking beneath merriment, and of madness leaping by a bound
into the regions of pure reason. And this he has achieved by the
all-subduing witchery of music--by melodies which solve the stiffest
contradictions, by the ebb and flow of measured sound rocking upon
its surface the most varied thoughts and feelings of the soul of man.
In the _Zauberflöte_ we are never surprised by any change, however
sudden--by any incident, however whimsical. After first lamenting over
the stupidity of the libretto, and then resigning ourselves to the
caprices of the fairy story, we are delighted to follow the wanderings
of music through her labyrinth of quaint and contradictory absurdities.
Just so, we fancy, must have been the case with Aristophanes.
Peisthetærus and Euelpides were not more discordant than Papageno;
the Birds had their language as Astrifiammante has hers; nor were
the deeper tones of Aristophanic meaning more out of place than the
bass notes of Sarastro, and the choruses of his attendant priests.
Music, which has harmonized the small and trivial contradictions of
the _Zauberflöte_, harmonized the vast and profound contradictions of
Aristophanic comedy. It was the melodramatic setting of such plays as
the _Birds_ and the _Clouds_ which caused their Weltvernichtungsidee to
blossom forth melodiously into the magic tree, with all its blossoms
and nightingales and merry apes, to which I have so often referred.
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.