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ARISTOPHANES
BY
REV. W. LUCAS COLLINS, M.A.
AUTHOR OF
‘ETONIANA,’ ‘THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS,’ ETC.
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MDCCCLXXII
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAP. I. INTRODUCTION, 1
“ II. THE KNIGHTS, 14
“ III. COMEDIES OF THE WAR: THE
ACHARNIANS.--THE PEACE.--LYSISTRATA, 38
“ IV. THE CLOUDS, 75
“ V. THE WASPS, 101
“ VI. THE BIRDS, 112
“ VII. THE FROGS, 125
“ VIII. THE WOMEN’S FESTIVAL.--THE ECCLESIAZUSÆ, 139
“ IX. PLUTUS, 154
NOTE.
In ‘The Knights,’ ‘The Acharnians,’ ‘The Birds,’ and ‘The Frogs,’ most
of the translated extracts are taken, by permission, from the admirable
version of those comedies by the late Mr Hookham Frere, and are marked
(F.) For all translations not so marked the present writer is
responsible.
ARISTOPHANES.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.
It has been observed already,[1] in speaking of these “ancient”
classical authors, that some of them, in their tone and spirit, have
much more in common with modern literature than with their great
predecessors who wrote in the same language, and whose volumes stand
ranged upon the same shelves. This may be remarked with especial truth
of these Comedies of Aristophanes. A national comedy which has any
pretension at all to literary merit--which is anything more than mere
coarse buffoonery--must, in its very nature, be of later growth than
epic or lyric poetry, tragedy, or historic narrative. It assumes a
fuller intellectual life, a higher civilisation, and a keener taste in
the people who demand it and appreciate it. And Athenian comedy, as we
have it represented in the plays of Aristophanes, implies all these in
a very high degree on the part of the audience to whom it was presented.
It flourished in those glorious days of Athens which not long preceded
her political decline,--when the faculties of her citizens were strung
to full pitch, when there was much wealth and much leisure, when the
arts were highly cultivated and education widely spread, and the
refinements and the vices which follow such a state of things presented
an ample field for the play of wit and fancy, the _badinage_ of the
humorist, or the more trenchant weapons of satire.
But although this Athenian comedy is, in one sense, so very modern in
its spirit, we must not place it in comparison with that which we call
comedy now. It was something quite different from that form of drama
which, with its elaborate and artistic plot, its lively incidents, and
brilliant dialogue, has taken possession under the same name of the
modern stage. It is difficult to compare it to any one form of modern
literature, dramatic or other. It perhaps most resembled what we now
call burlesque; but it had also very much in it of broad farce and comic
opera, and something also (in the hits at the fashions and follies of
the day with which it abounded) of the modern pantomime. But it was
something more, and more important to the Athenian public, than any or
all of these could have been. Almost always more or less political, and
sometimes intensely personal, and always with some purpose more or less
important underlying its wildest vagaries and coarsest buffooneries, it
supplied the place of the political journal, the literary review, the
popular caricature, and the party pamphlet, of our own times. It
combined the attractions and the influence of all these; for its
grotesque masks and elaborate “spectacle” addressed the eye as strongly
as the author’s keenest witticisms did the ear of his audience. Some
weak resemblance of it might have been found, in modern times, in that
curious outdoor drama, the Policinella of the Neapolitans: something of
the same wild buffoonery overlying the same caustic satire on the
prominent events and persons of the day, and even something of the same
popular influence.[2] The comic dramatist who produced his annual budget
of lampoon and parody has also been compared, not inaptly, to the “Terræ
Filius” of our universities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries;
that curious shadow of the old pagan saturnalia, when once in the year
some clever and reckless graduate claimed prescriptive right to launch
the shafts of his wit against proctors, doctors, heads of houses, and
dignities in general--too often without much more regard to decency than
his Athenian prototype. The Paris ‘Charivari’ and the London ‘Punch,’ in
their best days, had perhaps more of the tone of Aristophanes about them
than any other modern literary production; for Rabelais, who resembled
the Athenian dramatist in many of his worst characteristics as well as
his best, can scarcely be called modern, and has few readers. The ‘Age’
and the ‘Satirist’ newspapers, to those who remember them during their
brief day of existence, may well represent Athenian comedy in its worst
and most repulsive features--its scurrilous personalities and disregard
of decency.
It may be remembered by the readers of these volumes that the dramatic
representations at Athens took place only at the Dionysia, or Great
Festivals of Bacchus, which were held three times a-year, and that each
play was brought out by its author in competition for the prize of
tragedy or comedy which was then awarded to the successful exhibitors by
the public voice, and which was the object of intense ambition.[3] This
will in some degree account for the character of Attic comedy. It was an
appeal to the audience,--not only to their appreciation of wit and
humour, but also to their sympathies, social and political, their
passions, and their prejudices. Therefore it was so often bitterly
personal and so hotly political. The public demand was always for
something “sensational” in these respects, and the authors took care to
comply with it. And therefore, also, we find introduced so frequently
confidential appeals to the audience themselves, not only in those
addresses (called the _parabasis_) in which the author is allowed to
speak in his own proper person through the mouth of the Chorus, but also
on the part of the individual characters during the action of the play.
They enlist the spectators themselves among the _dramatis
personæ_,--not a very artistic proceeding, but no doubt popular and very
tempting. It has been adopted by modern dramatists, even by so high an
authority as Molière,[4] and notoriously by farce-writers of more recent
date.
But there could be no greater mistake than to suppose that the audience
before whom these plays of Aristophanes were represented were
impressible only by these lower influences. It has just been said that
education at Athens was widely spread. Readers, indeed, might not be
many, when books were necessarily so few; but the education which was
received by the masses through their constant attendance at the theatre,
the public deliberative assembly, and the law-courts, was quite as
effective in sharpening their intelligence and their memory. Fully to
realise to ourselves what Greek intellect was in the bright days of
Athens, and to understand how well that city deserved her claim to be
the intellectual “eye of Greece,” we should not appeal to the works of
her great poets, her historians, or her orators, which may be assumed
(though scarcely in the case of the tragedians) to have depended for
their due appreciation upon the finer tastes of the few: we must turn to
these comedies, addressed directly to an audience in which, although
those finer tastes were not unrepresented, the verdict of what we
should call the “masses” was essential to the author’s success. There is
abundant evidence in these pieces--it is impressed upon the reader
disagreeably in every one of them--that, willingly or unwillingly, the
writer pandered to the vulgar taste, and degraded his Muse to the level
of the streets in order to catch this popular favour; though not without
occasional protests in his own defence against such perversion of his
art--protests which we must fear were only half sincere. But there is
evidence quite as conclusive that the intellectual calibre, and even the
literary taste, of this audience was of a far higher character than that
of the modern pit and gallery. The dramatist not only assumes on their
behalf a familiarity with all the best scenes and points in the dramas
of the great tragedians--which, in the case of such inveterate
play-goers as the Athenians were, is not so very surprising--and an
acquaintance with the political questions and the public celebrities of
the day which possibly might be found, in this age when every man is
becoming a politician, amongst a Paris or a London theatrical auditory;
but he also expects to find, and evidently did find, an acquaintance
with, and an appreciation of, poetry generally, a comprehension of at
least the salient points of different systems of philosophy, and an
ability to seize at once and appropriate all the finer points of
allusion, of parody, and of satire. Aristophanes is quite aware of the
weaknesses and the wilfulness of this many-headed multitude, whom he
satirises so unsparingly to their faces; but he had good right to say
of them, as he does in his ‘Knights,’ that they were an audience with
whom he might make sure at least of being understood,--“For our friends
here are sharp enough.”[5]
It is to be regretted that the Comedies of Aristophanes are now less
read at our universities than they were some years ago. If one great
object of the study of the classics is to gain an accurate acquaintance
with one of the most brilliant and interesting epochs in the history of
the world, no pages will supply a more important contribution to this
knowledge than those of the great Athenian humorist. He lays the flesh
and blood, the features and the colouring, upon the skeleton which the
historian gives us. His portraits of political and historical
celebrities must of course be accepted with caution, as the works of a
professional caricaturist; but, like all good caricatures, they preserve
some striking characteristics of the men which find no place in their
historical portraits, and they let us know what was said and thought of
them by irreverent contemporaries. It is in these comedies that we have
the Athenians at home; and although modern writers of Athenian history
have laid them largely under contribution in the way of reference and
illustration, nothing will fill in the outline of the Athens of Cleon
and Alcibiades and Socrates so vividly as the careful study of one of
these remarkable dramas in the Greek original. One is inclined to place
more faith than is usually due to anecdotes of the kind in that which is
told of Plato, that when the elder Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, wrote
to him to request information as to the state of things at Athens, the
philosopher sent him a copy of Aristophanes’s ‘Clouds,’ as the best and
most trustworthy picture of that marvellous republic.
Of the writers of the “Old” Athenian comedy (so termed to distinguished
it from the “New,” which was of a different character, and more like our
own), Aristophanes is the only one whose works have come down to us. He
had some elder contemporaries who were formidable and often successful
rivals with him in the popular favour, but of their plays nothing now
remains but a few titles and fragments of plots preserved by other
writers. Of one of them, Cratinus, who died a few years after
Aristophanes began to write for the stage, the younger author makes some
not unkindly mention more than once, though he had been beaten by him
somewhat unexpectedly upon the old man’s last appearance, after some
interval of silence, in the dramatic arena. It is curious to learn that
in this his last production the veteran satirist found a subject in
himself. The critics and the public had accused him (not unjustly, if we
may trust Aristophanes here) of having grown too fond of wine, and of
dulling his faculties by this indulgence. His reply was this comedy,
which he called ‘The Bottle.’ He himself was the hero of the piece, and
was represented as having deserted his lawful wife, the Comic Muse, for
the charms of this new mistress. But in the catastrophe he was reformed
and reconciled to the worthier lady; and the theatrical critics--perhaps
out of sympathy with their old favourite--awarded him the first prize,
though Aristophanes had brought forward in the competition of that year
what he esteemed one of his masterpieces.[6]
The extreme licence of personal attack which was accorded by general
consent to the writers of comedy, so that any man whose character and
habits were at all before the public might find himself at any moment
held up to popular ridicule upon the stage, will be the subject of
remark hereafter. It must have been very unpleasant and embarrassing,
one must suppose, to the individuals thus marked out; but the sacredness
of private life and character was something unknown to an Athenian, and
he would not be nearly so sensitive on these points as ourselves. The
very fact that this licence was allowed to exist so long is some proof
that it was on the whole not unfairly exercised. The satiric writer must
have felt that his popularity depended upon his aiming his blows only
where the popular feeling held them to be well deserved; and there are
some follies and vices which this kind of castigation can best reach,
and cases of public shamelessness or corruption which, under a lax code
of morality, can only be fitly punished by public ridicule. When,
towards the close of the great struggle between Athens and Sparta, the
executive powers of the State had been usurped by the oligarchy of the
“Four Hundred,” a law was passed to prohibit, under strong penalties,
the introduction of real persons into these satiric dramas: but the
check thus put to the right of popular criticism upon public men and
measures was only a token of the decline of Athenian liberty. The free
speech of comedy was in that commonwealth what the freedom of the press
is in our own; and, in both cases, the risk of its occasional abuse was
not so dangerous as its suppression.
Something must be said of the personal history of our author himself,
though such biographical account of him as we have is more or less
apocryphal. He was no doubt a free citizen of Athens, because when the
great popular demagogue Cleon, whom he had so bitterly satirised on the
stage, took his revenge by an attempt to prove the contrary in a court
of law, he failed in his purpose. Aristophanes was also probably a man
of some wealth, since he had property, as he tells us in one of his
plays, in the island of Ægina. In politics and in social questions he
was a stanch Conservative; proud of the old days of Athenian greatness,
jealous of the new habits and fashions which he thought tended to
enervate the youth of the state, and the new systems of philosophy which
were sapping the foundations of morality and honesty. His conservatism
tended perhaps to the extreme, or at least takes that appearance in the
exaggeration natural to the comic satirist; for he certainly appears
occasionally as the champion of a pre-scientific age, when gymnastics
held a higher place in education than philosophy, and when the stout
Athenian who manned the galleys at Salamis thought he knew enough if he
“knew how to ask for barley-cake, and shout his yo-heave-oh!”[7] He was
as much of an aristocrat as a man might be, to be an Athenian: he hated
the mob-orators of his time, not only for their principles but for their
vulgar origin, with an intensity which he did not care to disguise, and
which, had not his wit and his boldness made him a popular favourite,
rather in spite of his opinions than because of them, would have brought
him into even more trouble than it actually did. He began to write for
the stage at a very early age--so early, that he was not allowed by law
to produce his two first pieces (now unfortunately lost) in his own
name. Some of the old commentators would have us believe that he wrote
his first comedy when he was only eighteen, but this, from internal
evidence, seems improbable; he must have been five or six years older.
He supplied the dramatic festivals with comedies, more or less
successful, for at least thirty-seven years (from B.C. 427 to 390); but
of the forty plays which he is known to have produced we have only
eleven, and some of them in a more or less imperfect form. For the
preservation of these, according to ancient tradition, we are indebted
to one who might have seemed a very unlikely patron for this kind of
pagan literature--no other than St John Chrysostom. That worthy father
of the Church is said to have slept with a manuscript of Aristophanes
under his pillow; it is at least certain that he had studied his plays
and admired them, since he has not unfrequently imitated their language
in his own writings.
Some enthusiastic admirers of Aristophanes would have us regard him not
only as a brilliant humorist, but as a high moral teacher, concealing a
grand design under the mask of a buffoon. They seem to think that he
was impelled to write comedy chiefly by a patriotic zeal for the welfare
of Athens, and a desire to save his countrymen from corrupting
influences. This is surely going too far. His comedies have a political
cast, mainly because at Athens every man was a politician; and no doubt
the opinions which he advocates are those which he honestly entertained.
But he would probably have been content himself with the reputation of
being what he was,--a brilliant and successful writer for the stage; a
vigorous satirist, who lashed vice by preference, but had also a jest
ready against ungainly virtue; a professional humorist who looked upon
most things on their ludicrous side; who desired to be honest and manly
in his vocation, and, above all things, not to be dull.
It may be right to say a word here, very briefly, as to the coarseness
of the great comedian. It need not be said that it will find no place in
these pages. He has been censured and apologised for on this ground,
over and over again. Defended, strictly speaking, he cannot be. His
personal exculpation must always rest upon the fact, that the wildest
licence in which he indulged was not only recognised as permissible, but
actually enjoined as part of the ceremonial at these festivals of
Bacchus: that it was not only in accordance with public taste, but was
consecrated (if terms may be so abused) as a part of the national
religion. Such was the curse which always accompanied the nature-worship
of Paganism, and infected of necessity its literature. But the
coarseness of Aristophanes is not corrupting. There is nothing immoral
in his plots, nothing really dangerous in his broadest humour. Compared
with some of our old English dramatists, he is morality itself. And when
we remember the plots of some French and English plays which now attract
fashionable audiences, and the character of some modern French and
English novels not unfrequently found upon drawing-room tables, the
least that can be said is, that we had better not cast stones at
Aristophanes.