We are love-sick for this nameless thing that glitters here
on the earth, because no man has tasted a^tother life, because
the things binder us are unrevealed, and we float upon a
stream of legend!' There is not one play of Euripides
in which a critic cannot find serious flaws and offences ;
though it is true, perhaps, that the worse the critic, the
more he will find. Euripides was not essentially an
artist. He was a man of extraordinary brain-power,

^ Hip. 733. The cavern in question was in the moon. Cf. Apollonius,
Arg. iii. 1 21 2, and Plutarch On the Face in the Moon, § 29, Hym, Dem. 25.



274 LITERATURE OE ANCIENT GREECE

dramatic craft, subtlety, sympathy, couraf^e, imagination ;
he saw too deep into the world and took things too
rebelliously to produce calm and successful poetry. Yet
many will feel as Philemon did : " 7/" / were certain
that the dead had ccnisciousnesSj J would hang myself to see
Euripides,"



XIII
COMEDY

Before Aristophanes

A^'CIENT comedy, a development from the mumming
of the vintage and harvest feasts, took artistic form in
the two great centres of commercial and popular life,
Syracuse and Athens. The Sicilian comedy seems to
have come first. Epicharmus is said to have flourished
in 486. He was a native of Cos, who migrated first to
Sicilian Megara, and then to Syracuse. His remains are
singularly scanty compared with his reputation, and it
is hard to form a clear idea of him. He was a comedy-
writer and a philosopher, apparently of a Pythagorean
type. His comedies are partly burlesques of heroic sub-
jects, like the Cyclops* Busiris* Projiidtkeus* resembling
the satyric dramas of Athens, and such comedies as
the Odysses* and Chirones* of Cratinus. Others, like the
Rustic* and the Sight-Seers* were mimes, representing
scenes from ordinary life. In this field he had a
rival, SOPHRON, who wrote * Feminine Mimes ' and
* Masculine Mimes,' and has left us such titles as the
Tunny-Fisher* the Messenger* the Seamstresses* the
Mother-in- Law* A third style of composition followed
by Epicharmus was semi-philosophical, like the discus-
sion between * Logos ' and * Logina,' Male and Female

Reason, or whatever the words mean. And he wrote

275



2']6 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

one strictly pliilosophical poem, On Nature* We hear
that the comedies were rapid and busthng ; but, of
course, the remnants that have survived owe their life
merely to some literary quality, whether pithiness of
thought or grammatical oddity. His description of a
parasite — the thing existed in his time, though not the
word — is excellent.^ It is interesting to find him using
puns of the most undisguised type, as where one
speaker describes Zeus as IleXoTn 7' epavov lanwv, and
the other hears 7' epavov as ^epavov, and supposes that
the god fed his guest on a crane. A typical piece of
conversation is the following : ^ "A. After the sacrifice
came a feast, and after the feast a drinking-party. B. That
seems nice. K. And after the drinking-party a rev el , after
the revel a swinery, after the swinery a summons, after
the summons a condemnation, and after the condemnation
fetters and stocks and a fine!' The other side of the
man is represented by his philosophical sayings: ^^ Mind
hath sight and Mind hath hearing ; all tilings else are
deaf and blind " ; " Character is destiny to man " ; or,
one of the most frequently-quoted lines of antiquity,
^^ Be sober, and remember to disbelieve: these are the sinews
of the mind'.' The metre of Epicharmus is curiously
loose ; it suggests the style of a hundred years later,
but his verbose and unfinished diction marks the early
craftsman. He often reminds one of Lucilius and
Plautus.

The Attic comedy was developed on different lines,
and, from about 460 B.C. onwards, followed in the steps
of tragedy. The ground-form seems to be a twofold
division, with the 'parabasis' between. First comes a

^ P. 225, Lorenz, Leben, &c. ^ Fr. incert. 44.



SICILIAN AND ATTIC COMEDY 277

general explanation of the supposed situation and the
meaning of the disguises ; then the * parabasis,' the
' coming-forward ' of the whole choir as the author's
representative, to speak in his name about current
topics of interest ; then a loose string of farcical
scenes, illustrating, in no particular order or method,
the situation as reached in the first part. The end is
a ' comos ' or revel, in which the performers go off
rejoicing. For instance, in our earliest surviving
comedy, the Acharnians of Aristophanes, the first part,
which has become genuinely dramatic by this time,
explains how the hero contrives to make a private peace
with the Peloponnesians ; then comes the 'parabasis';
then a series of disconnected scenes showing the fun
that he and his family have, and the unhappy plight of
all the people about them.

Of the oldest comic writers — Chionides, Ecphantides,
Magnes — we know little. The first important name is
Cratinus, who carried on against Pericles — " the squill-
headed God Almighty^' '^ the child of Cronos and Double-
dealing" — the same sort of war which was waged by
Aristophanes against Cleon. Critics considered him in-
comparable in force, but too bitter. Aristophanes often
refers to him : he was ^^ like a mountain-torrent, sweeping
down houses and trees and people who stood in his way!'
He was an initiated Orphic, who had eaten the flesh of
the bull Bacchus,^ and also a devotee of Bacchus in the
modern sense. In the Knights (424 B.C.) his younger
rival alluded to him pityingly as a fine fellow quite ruined
by drink. The reference roused the old toper. Next
year he brought out the Pytine* ('Wine-Flask'), a kind
of outspoken satire on himself, in which his wife Comedy

1 Fr. 357. See Maass, Orpheus, p. io6.



278 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

redeems him from the ckitches of the designing Pytine.
He won the first prize, and Aristophanes was last on the
hst. But a wreck he w^as after all, and was dead by 421.
One of his actors — he employed three — was Crates, who
wrote with some success, and has the distinction of having
first produced drunken men on the stage.

Pherekrates, who won his first victory in 437, was a
praiseworthy but tiresome writer, to judge by his very
numerous fragments. He had better plots than his con-
temporaries, and approached the manner of the later
comedy. He treats social subjects, such as the impu-
dence of slaves and the ways of 'hetairai'; .he has a
violent attack on Timotheus and the new style of music.
He also shows signs of the tendency which is so strong
in Aristophanes, to make plays about imaginary regions
of bliss ; in his Miners,^ for instance, a golden age is
found going on somewhere deep in or under the earth,
and in his Ant-Men* there was probably something
similar. We only know of one political drama by him
— an attack on Alcibiades.

EUPOLIS is the most highly praised of the contem-
poraries of Aristophanes. His characteristic was xapt?,
'charm' or 'grace,' as contrasted with the force and
bitterness of Cratinus, and the mixture of the two in
Aristophanes. These three formed the canon of comic
writers in Alexandria. It is said that the death of
Eupolis in battle at the Hellespont was the occasion
of exemption from military service being granted to
professional poets. His political tendencies were so far
similar to those of Aristophanes that the two collaborated
in the most savage piece of comedy extant, the Knights,
and accused one another of plagiarism afterwards. That
play was directed against Cleon. In the Marikds*



FIFTH-CENTURY COMEDY 279

Eupolis wrote against Hyperbolus ; in the Dejnoi"^ he
spoke well of Pericles as an orator (frag. 94), but this
was after his death and probably did not mean much.
In reviling Cleon it was well to praise Pericles, just as
in reviling Hyperbolus it was well to praise Cleon.
Comedy was an ultra-democratic institution, as the Old
Oligarch remarked, yet all the comic writers have an
aristocratic bias. This is partly because their province
Vas satire, not praise : if they were satisfied w'ith the
course of politics, they wrote about something else which
they were not satisfied with. Partly, perhaps, it is
that they shared the bias of the men of culture. But
Eupolis was more liberal than Aristophanes. Aristo-
phanes does not seem ever to have violently attacked
rich people.^ Eupolis WTote his Flatterers* against
'Money-bag Callias' and his train, and his Baptai* or
Dippers * against Alcibiades. The latter piece represented
one of those mystical and enthusiastic worships which
were so prominent at the time, that of a goddess named
Cotytto. Baptism was one of the rites ; and so was
secrecy, unfortunately for the reputation of those con-
cerned. The Greek layman attributed the worst possible
motives to any one who made a secret of his religious
observances or prayed in a low voice.

Phrynichus, son of Eunomides, w^ho won his first
prize in 429, and Plato, of whom we know no piece
certainly earlier than 405, bridge the transition to the
comedy of manners, which arose in the fourth century.
The Solitary* of Phrynichus is an instance of a piece
which was a failure because it was produced some twenty
years before the public were ready for it. We have no
purely political play from Phrynichus ; from Plato we

^ Alcibiades had fallen at the time of the Triphales*



2So LITERATURE OE ANCIENT GREECE

have a Hjperbolus* a Cleophon* and one called the
Alliance* dealing with the alleged conspiracy of Nikias,
Pha^ax, and Alcibiades to get Hyperbolus ostracised.



Aristophanes, son of Philippus, from Kydathenaion
{ca. 450 B.C. to ca. 385 B.C.)

By far the most successful of the writers of the old
comedy was Aristophanes ; and though he had certain
external advantages over Cratinus, and enjoyed a much
longer active life than Eupolis, he seems, by a com-
parison of the fragments of all the writers of this form
of literature, to have deserved his success. He held
land in ^gina. There is no reason to doubt his full
Athenian citizenship, though some lines of Eupolis
(fi"ag- 357)> complaining of the success of foreigners,
have been supposed to refer to him. He probably
began writing very young. At least he explains that
he had to produce his first piece, the Daitales * (' Men of
Guzzleton ') under the name of his older friend the actor
Caliistratus ; partly because he was too young for some-
thing or other — perhaps too young to have much chance
of obtaining a chorus from the archon ; partly because,
though he had written the play, he had not enough
experience to train the chorus. This manner of produc-
tion became almost a habit with him. He produced the
Daitales,"^ Babylonians* Acharnians, Birds, and Lysistrata
under the name of Caliistratus ; the Wasps, Amphiardus,*
and Frogs under that of Philonides. That is, these
two persons had the trouble of teaching the chorus,
and the pleasure of receiving the state payment for
the production. They also had their names proclaimed



FIRST APPEARANCES OF ARISTOPHANES 281

as authors, though every one knew that they were not
so. Whatever monetary arrangement the poet eventu-
ally made, this process meant the payment of money
for the saving of trouble ; and, taken in conjunction
with his land in ^gina, and his general dislike for the
poor, it warrants us in supposing that Aristophanes was a
rich man. He had the prejudices and also the courage of
the independent gentleman. His first piece (427 B.C.)
was an attack on the higher education of the time,
which the satirist, of course, represented as immoral
in tendency. The main character was the father of
two sons, one virtuous and old-fashioned, the other
vicious and new-fashioned. The young poet obtained
the second prize, and was delighted. Next year (426)
he made a violent attack, with the vigour but not the
caution of the Old Oligarch, on the system of the
Democratic Empire. The play was called the Baby-
lonians ;* the chorus consisted of the allies represented
as slaves working on the treadmill for their master
Demos. The poet chose for the production of this
play the midsummer Dionysia when the representa-
tives of the allies were all present in Athens. He suc-
ceeded in making a scandal, and was prosecuted by
Cleon, apparently for treason. We do not know what
the verdict was. In the AckarnianSy Aristophanes makes
a kind of apology for his indiscretion, and remarks that
he had had such a rolling in dirt as all but killed him.
He afterwards reserved his extreme home-truths ior the
festival of the Lenaea, in early spring, before the season
for foreigners in Athens.

The Acharnians was acted at the Lenaea of 425 ; it is
the oldest comedy preserved, and a very good one (see
p. 277). It is political in its main purpose, and is directed



282 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

against Cleon and Lamachus, as representing the war
party ; but the poet handles his formidable enemy with
a certain caution ; while, on the other hand, he goes out
of his way to attack Euripides (p, 260), whom he had
doubtless already made responsible for the * corrup-
tion of the age' in the Daitalcs* We do not know
of any personal cause of enmity between the two men ;
but it is a fact that, in a degree far surpassing the other
comic writers, Aristophanes can never get Euripides
out of his head. One might be content with the fact
that Euripides was just the man to see how vulgar and
unreal most of the comedian's views were, and that
Aristophanes was acute enough to see that he saw it.
But it remains a curious thing that Aristophanes, in the
first place, imitates Euripides to a noteworthy extent —
so much so that Cratinus invented a word ' Euripid-
aristophanize ' to describe the style of the two ; and,
secondly, he must, to judge from his parodies, have
read and re-read Euripides till he knew him practically
by heart.

In 424 Aristophanes had his real fling. The situation
assumed in the Knights is that a crusty old man called
Demos has fallen wholly into the power of his rascally
Paphlagonian slave ; his two home-bred slaves get hold
of an oracle of Bakis, ordaining that Demos shall be
governed in turn by four 'mongers' or 'chandlers' —
the word is an improvised coinage — each doomed to
yield to some one lower than himself. The 'hemp-
chandler ' has had his day, and the ' sheep-chandler ' ;
now there is the Paphlagonian ' leather-chandler,' who
shall in due time yield to — what ? A ' black-pudding
chandler !' ^^ Lord Poseidon, what a trade!" shouts the
delighted house-slave, and at the critical instant there



'ACHARNIANS; 'KNIGHTS' 283

appears an abnormally characteristic costermonger
with a tray of black-puddings. The two conspirators
rouse the man to his great destiny. The rest of the
play is a wild struggle between the Paphlagonian and
the black-pudding man, in which the former is routed
at his own favourite pursuits — lying, perjury, stealing,
and the art of 'cheek.' The Paphlagonian, of course,
is Cleon, who owned a tannery ; the two slaves are
Nikias and Demosthenes ; the previous ' chandlers '
were apparently Lysicles and Eucrates. But the poet
tells us that, in the first place, he could get no actor
to take the part of Cleon, and, secondly, that when he
took the part himself the mask-painters refused to make
a mask representing Cleon. The play is a perfect marvel
of rollicking and reckless abuse. Yet it is wonderfully
funny, and at the end, where there is a kind of trans-
formation scene, the black-pudding man becoming a good
genius, and Demos recovering his senses, there is some
eloquent and rather noble patriotism. The attack is
not exactly venomous nor even damaging. It can have
done very little to spoil Cleon's chances of election to
any post he desired. It is a hearty deluge of mud
in return for the prosecution of 426. Such a play, if
once accepted by the archon, and not interrupted by
a popular tumult, was likely to be a succh fou ; as a
matter of fact, the Knights won the first prize.

The next year there was a reaction. The Clouds,
attacking the new culture as typified in Socrates, was
beaten, both by the Wine- Flask '^ of the 'wreck'
Cratinus, and by the Conmis* of Ameipsias. Aristo-
phanes complains of this defeat 1 in a second version
of the play, which has alone come down to us. He

^ Clouds, 'parabasis.'



284 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

considered it the best thing he had ever written. Be-
sides the ' parabasis,' two scenes in our Clouds are stated
not to have occurred in the original play — the dialogue
between the Just Cause and the Unjust Cause, and the
rather effective close where Socrates's house is burnt.
The present play is manifestly unfinished and does
not hang together, but the interest taken by posterity
in the main character has made it perhaps the most
celebrated of all Aristophanes's works. The situation —
an old man wishing to learn from a sophist the best way
to avoid paying his debts — is not really a very happy
one ; and, in spite of the exquisite style which Aristo-
phanes always has at command, and the humour of
particular situations, the play is rather tame. Socrates
must have done something to attract public notice at
this time, since he was also the hero of the Connus.^
Ameipsias described him as a poor, hungr)^, ragged
devil, who ' insulted the bootmakers ' by his naked feet,
but nevertheless 'never deigned to flatter.' That cari-
cature is nearer to the original than is the sophist of the
Clouds, who combines various traits of the real Socrates
with all the things he most emphatically disowned — the
atheism of Diagoras, the grammar of Protagoras, the
astronomy and physics of Diogenes of Apollonia. How-
ever, the portrait is probably about as true to life as
those of Cleon, Agathon, or Cleonymus, and considerably
less ill-natured.

In 422 Aristophanes returned again from the move-
ment of thought to ordinary politics. The Wasps is a
satire on the love of the Athenians for sitting in the
jury courts and trying cases. It must have been a
fascinating occupation to many minds : there .was intel-
lectual interest in it, and the charm of conscious power.



'CLOUDS.' 'WASPS.' 'PEACE' 285

But it is hard to believe that too many difficulties were
settled by 'Justice,' and too few by force, even in the
last quarter of the fifth century. Nor is it necessary to
conclude that Aristophanes would really have liked a
return to the more primitive methods which the growth
of Athenian law had superseded. The Wasps probably^
won the first prize. Its political tendency is visible in
the names of the insane old judge Philocleon and his
wiser son Bdelycleon — 'Love-Cleon ' and 'Loathe-Cleon'
respectively. And the sham trial got up for the enter-
tainment of Philocleon is a riddle not hard to read : the
dog Labes is vexatiously prosecuted by a dog (' Kuon ')
from Kydathenaion for stealing a cheese, just as the
general Laches had been prosecuted by Cleon from
Kydathenaion for extortion. The various ways in which
Philocleon's feelings are worked upon, his bursts of in-
dignation and of pity, look like a good parody of the
proceedings of an impulsive Athenian jury. Racine's
celebrated adaptation, Les Plaideurs, does not quite make
up by its superior construction for its loss of ' go ' and
naturalness. The institutions of the Wasps are essentially
those of its own age.

In 421 Aristophanes produced the Peace, a weak re-
chauffe of the Acharnians, only redeemed by the parody
of Euripides's Bellerophon* with which it opens. The
hero does not possess a Pegasus, as Bellerophon did,
but he fattens up a big Mount Etna beetle — the huge
beast that one sees rolling balls in the sandy parts of
Greece and Italy — and flies to heaven upon it, to the
acute annoyance of his servants and daughters. The
Peace won the second prize.

After 421 comes a gap of seven years in our records.

^ The ' Hypothesis ' is corrupt. Cf. Leo in Rh. Mus. xxxiii.
20



286 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

We may guess that the Old Age* in which some old men
were rejuvenated, was produced in the interval, and also
the A»ip/nardiis* in which some one goes to 'dream
a dream ' in the temple of the hero at Oropus. The
same subject is satirised in the Plutus many years after
{cf. also p. 328). The next play in our tradition is Aristo-
phanes's unquestioned masterpiece, the Birds (414 B.C.).
It has perhaps more fun, certainly more sustained in-
terest, and more exquisite imagination and lyric beauty,
than any of his other works. It is a revelation of the
extraordinary heights to which the old comedy with
all its grotesqueness could rise. The underlying motive
is the familiar desire to escape from the worry of
reality, into some region of a quite dififerent sort. Two
Athenians, Peithetairus ('Persuader') and Euelpides
(' Hopefulson '), having realised the fact that Tereus was
a king of Athens before he was turned into a hoopoe
and became king of the Birds — a fact established beyond
doubt by Sophocles and other highly-respected poets —
determine to find him out, and to form a great Bird-
commonwealth. Peithetairus is a splendid character,
adapting himself to every situation and converting
every opponent. He rouses the melancholy Tereus ;
convinces the startled and angry Birds ; gets wings
made ; establishes a constitution, public buildings, and
defences ; receives and rejects multitudes of applicants
for citizenship, admitting, for instance, a lyric-poet and
a ' father-beater,' who seems to be the ancient equivalent
for a wife-beater, but drawing the line at a prophet, an
inspector, and a man of science. Meantime the new
city has blocked the communication of the gods with
Earth, and cut off their supplies of incense. Their
messenger Iris is arrested for trespassing on the Birds'



THE BIRDS 287

territory, and Peithetairus makes the poor girl cry ! At
last the gods have to propose terms. But a deserter
has come to Peithetairus beforehand : it is Prometheus,
the enemy of Zeus, hiding from ' Them Above ' under
a large umbrella — how much further can cheery pro-
fanity go? — and bringing information about the weak-
ness of the gods. When the embassy comes, it consists
of one wise man, Poseidon ; one stupid man, who is
seduced by the promise of a good dinner, Heracles ; and
one absolute fool, Triballos, who cannot talk intelligibly,
and does not know what he is voting for. Zeus restores
to the Birds the sceptre of the world, and gives to
Peithetairus the hand of his beautiful daughter Basileia
(* Sovereignty '), and ' Cloudcuckootown ' is established
for ever. A lesser man would have felt bound to bring
it to grief ; but the rules of comedy really forbade such
an ending, and Aristophanes is never afraid of his own
fancies. There is very little political allusion in the
play. Aristophanes's party were probably at the time
content if they could prevent Athens from sending rein-
forcements to Sicily and saving the army that was
during these very months rotting under the walls of
Syracuse. The whole play is a refusal to think about
such troublous affairs. It was beaten by Ameipsias's
Revellers* but seems to have made some impression,
as Archippus soon after wrote his Fishes* in imitation
of it.

The next two plays of our tradition are written under
the shadow of the oligarchy of 411. Politics are not
safe, and Aristophanes tries to make up for them by
daring indecency. The Lysistrata might be a very fine
play ; the heroine is a real character, a kind of female
Peithetairus, with more high principle and less sense of



288 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

humour. The main idea— the women strike in a body
and refuse to have any deahngs with men until peace is
made — was capable of any kind of treatment ; and the
curious thing is that Aristophanes, while professing to
ridicule the women, is all through on their side. The
jokes made by the superior sex at the expense of the
inferior — to give them their Roman names — are seldom
remarkable either for generosity or for refinement. And
it is our author's pleasant humour to accuse everybody
of every vice he can think of at the moment. Yet with
the single exception that he credits women with an
inordinate fondness for wine-parties — the equivalent, it
would seem, of afternoon tea — he makes them, on the
whole, perceptibly more sensible and more * sympathetic '
than his men. Of course the emancipation of women
was one of the ideas of the time. Aristophanes wrote
two plays on the subject. Two other comedians, Amphis
and Alexis, wrote one each, and that before Plato had