made his famous pronouncement, or the Cynics started
their women-preachers. It was an instinct in Aristo-
phanes to notice and superficially to assimilate most of
the advanced thought of his time ; if he had gone
deeper, he would have taken things seriously and spoilt
his work. He always turns back before he has under-
stood too much, and uses his half-knowledge and partial
sympathy to improve his mocking.
The ThesmophoriazuscE^ written in the same year and
under the same difficulties, is a very clever play. The
women assembled at the feast of Thesmophoria, to
which no men were admitted, take counsel together how-
to have revenge on Euripides for representing such
'horrid' women in his tragedies. Euripides knows of
the plan, and persuades his father-in-law to go to the
LYSISTRATA. THESM0PH0RIA2US.E 289
meeting in disguise and speak in his defence. The in-
truder is discovered and handed over to a pohceman ;
he eventually escapes by his son-in-law's help. Euripides
hums fragments of his own plays behind the scenes, and
the prisoner hums answering fragments under the police-
man's nose, till the plot is arranged. The play was acted
twice in slightly different versions.
In the next few years we have the Lemnian Women*
about the newly-established worship of Bendis at the
Piraeus ; the Gerytades* which seems to have been
similar in plot to the Frogs ; and the PhcenisscE* in mere
parody — a new departure this — of Euripides's tragedy of
that name. We have also a play directed against Alci-
biades, the Triphalcs* It dealt certainly with his private
life, and possibly with his public action. If so, it is the
last echo of the political drama of the fifth century, a
production for which the world has never again possessed
sufficient ' parrhesia ' — ' free-spokenness.'
The death of Euripides in 406 gave Aristophanes the
idea of founding a whole play, the Frogs, on the contrast
between the poetry of his childhood and that which was
called new — though, as a matter of fact, this latter was
passing swiftly out of existence, ^schylus and Euripides
were dead, Sophocles dying ; Agathon had retired to
Macedonia. The patron-god of the drama, Dionysus,
finds life intolerable with such miserable poets as now
are left him. He resolves to go to Hades and fetch
Euripides back. When he gets there — his adventures
on the way, disguised as Heracles, but very unworthy
of the lion's skin, are among the best bits of fun in
Aristophanes — he finds that after all Euripides is not
alone, ^schylus is there too; and the position becomes
delicate. The two were already disputing about the
290 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
place of honour when he came. The death of Sophocles
must have occurred when the play was half written : he
has to be mentioned, but is represented as having no
wish to return to earth ; while Dionysus himself affects
to be anxious to see what sort of work lophon will do
without his father's help. His poetry is not criticised
or parodied. On the arrival of Dionysus, there follows
a long contest between the two poets. It seems a
pedantic subject, and it is certainly wonderful that an
Athenian audience can have sat listening and laughing
for hours to a piece of literary criticism in the form of a
play. But the fact remains that the play makes even a
modern reader laugh aloud as he reads. As to the judg-
ments passed on the two poets, one may roughly say
that the parodies are admirable, the analytical criticism
childish.^ Aristophanes feels all the points with singular
sensitiveness, but he does not know how to name them
or expound them, as, for instance, Aristotle did. The
choice is hard to make : " I tliink the one clever, but I
enjoy the other," says Dionysus. Eventually he leaves the
decision to his momentary feelings and chooses -^schylus.
It would be quite wrong to look on the play as a mere
attack on Euripides. The case would be parallel if we
could imagine some modern writer like the late Mr.
Calverley, a writer of comedy and parody with a keen
and classic literary taste, sending Dionysus to call Brown-
ing back to us, and deciding in the end that he would
sooner have Keats.
There comes another great gap before we meet, in
392, the poorest of Aristophanes's plays, the Ecclesiaziis<2
or ' Women in Parliament.' It reads at first like a parody
of the scheme for communism and abolition of the
^ The musical criticism, which is plentiful, of course passes over our heads.
FROGS. ECCLESIAZUS^. PLUTUS 291
family given by Plato in Republic V. The dates will
not allow this ; but it is, of course, quite likely that
Plato had expressed some such views in lectures or
conversation before he put them in writing. The
schemes are far from identical. In Plato the sexes are
equal ; in Aristophanes the men are disfranchised. The
marriage system is entirely different. The communism
and the simplification of life might be sympathetic paro-
dies of Plato, but Aristophanes will not have the severe
training or the military saints at any price. The
Ecclesiazuscz has a larger subject than the merely
political Lysistrata, but it is a much tamer play.
The Plutus (388 B.C.) is the last play of Aristophanes
preserved, and is very different from the rest. It may
almost be called a play without personalities, without
politics, without parabasis ; that is, it belongs practically
not to the old but to the middle comedy — the transi-
tion to the pure comedy of manners. It is, indeed,
still founded on a sort of * hypothesis,' like the Birds
or the Acharnians. Plutus ('Wealth') is a blind god;
if we could catch him and get his eyesight restored
by a competent oculist or a miracle-working temple,
what a state of things it would be ! The main lines
of the play form merely the working out of this
idea. But the new traits appear in many details ;
we have the comic slave, impudent, rascally, but
indispensable, who plays such an important part in
Menander and Terence, and we have character-draw-
ing for its own sake in the hero's friend Blepsidemus.
We hear of two later plays called Aiolosikon* and
Cocalus* which Aristophanes gave to his son Araros
to make his debut with, Sikon is a cook's name ; so,
presumably, the first represented the old Wind-god
292 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
acting in that capacity. The second, hke so many of
the new comedy plays, contained a story, not comic but
romantic, with a seduction and a recognition.
Aristophanes is beyond doubt a very great writer.
The wisdom of his pohtics, the general value of his
view of life, and, above all, the ' Sittliche Ernst ' which
his admirers find in his treatment of his opponents'
alleged vices, may well be questioned. Yet, admitting
that he often opposed what was best in his age, or
advocated it on the lowest grounds ; admitting that his
slanders are beyond description, and that as a rule he
only attacks the poor, and the leaders of the poor—
nevertheless he does it all with such exuberant high
spirits, such an air of its all being nonsense together,
such insight and swiftness, such incomparable direct-
ness and charm of style, that even if some Archelaus
had handed him over to Euripides to scourge, he
would probably have escaped his well-earned whipping.
His most characteristic quality, perhaps, is his combina-
tion of the wildest and broadest farce on the one hand,
with the most exquisite lyric beauty on the other. Of
course the actual lyrics are loose and casual in work-
manship ; it argues mere inexperience in writing lyric
verse for a critic seriously to compare them in this
respect with the choruses of Sophocles and Euripides.
But the genius is there, if the hard work is not.
As a dramatist, Aristophanes is careless about construc-
tion ; but he has so much 'go' and lifting power that he
makes the most absurd situations credible. He has a
real gift for imposing on his audience's credulity. His
indecency comes partly, no doubt, from that peculiarly
Greek naivete, which is the result of simple and un-
alfected living ; partly it has no excuse to urge except
APPRECIATION OF ARISTOPHANES 293
that it is not deliberately vicious (and cf. p. 211). It is
instructive to know that Plato liked Aristophanes. Of
course their politics agreed ; but if there is any truth
in the anecdote ^ that Plato made Dionysius of Syracuse
read the Knights in order to see what Athenian political
life was like, it was merely the free-speaking that he
wished to illustrate. The comedian's speech in the Sy?n-
posiuni shows the inner bond which united these two great
princes of imagination. But only his own age could really
stand Aristophanes. The next century wanted more
refinement and character-work, more plot and sentiment
and sobriety. It got what it wanted in Menander.
The Alexandrians indeed had enough of the genuine
antiquarian spirit to love the old comedy. It was full of
information about bygone things, it was hard, it belonged
thoroughly to the past ; they studied Aristophanes
more than any poet except Homer. But later ages
found him too wild and strong and breezy. Plutarch's
interesting criticism of him as compared with Menander
is like an invalid's description of a high west wind.
At the present day he seems to share with Homer and
yEschylus and Theocritus the power of appealing directly
to the interest and sympathy of almost every reader.
' Vita xi. in Duebner's Scholia.
XIV
PLATO
Plato, son of Ariston, from Koll-^tus (427-347 b.c.)
Descended by his father's side from Codrus, the last
king of Attica, through his mother from Solon ; a cousin
of Critias and nephew of Charmides ; an accomplished
gymnast and wrestler, a facile and witty writer ; with
a gift for occasional poems and an ambition towards
tragedy, with an unusually profound training in music,
mathematics, and letters, as well as a dash of Heraclitean
philosophy; Plato must have seemed in his early days a
type of the brilliant young Athenian aristocrat. He might
have aspired to a career like that of Alcibiades, but his
traditions and preferences made him turn away from legiti-
mate political action. He despised the masses, and was
not going to flatter them. He went in sympathies, if not
in action, with his relatives along the road dimly pointed
by the Old Oligarch — the road of definite conspiracy with
help from abroad. When he first met Socrates he was
twenty, and not a philosopher. He was one of the
fashionable youths who gathered about that old sage to
enjoy the process of having their wits sharpened, and
their dignified acquaintances turned into ridicule. These
young men were socially isolated as well as exclusive.
They avoided the Ecclesia, where oligarchism was not
admitted ; their views were as a rule too 'advanced' for
2Q4
MIMES 295
official exposition on the stage. They mostly read their
tragedies to one another.
Plato amused his friends with a new kind of literature,
the mime. It was a form which seems to be intro-
ducing itself among ourselves at the present moment
— the close study of little social scenes and conversa-
tions, seen mostly in the humorous aspect. The two
great mime-writers, Epicharmus and Sophron, had by
this time made their way from Sicily to all the cul-
tured circles of Greece. Plato's own efforts were in
prose, like Sophron's, though we hear that he slept
with the poems of Epicharmus under his pillow. A
mass of material lay ready to hand — one Tisamenus of
Teos had perhaps already utilised it — in the conversa-
tions of Socrates with the divers philosophers and digni-
taries. Plato's earliest dialogue ^ seems to be preserved.
In the Laches Socrates is formally introduced to the
reader as a person able, in spite of his unpromising
appearance, to discuss all manner of subjects. Two
fathers, who are thinking of having their sons trained
by a certain semi-quackish fencing-master, ask the great
generals Laches and Nikias to see one of his perform-
ances and advise them, Socrates is called into the
discussion, and after some pleasant character-drawing
it is made evident that the two generals have no notion
what courage is, nor consequently what a soldier ought
to be. The Greater Hippias is more outspokenly humo-
^ I follow mainly the linguistic tests as given in C. Ritter's statistical
tables. The chief objections to this method are — (i) the statistics are not yet
sufficiently comprehensive and delicate ; (2) it is difficult to allow for the fact,
which is both attested by tradition and independently demonstrable, that
Plato used to work over his published dialogues. But I do not expect the
results of Campbell, Dittenberger, Schanz, Gomperz, Biass, Ritter, to be
seriously modified.
296 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
rous. Socrates applies to the sophist to know what
* the beautiful ' (to koXov) is ; he has a * friend ' at home
'with a big stick' who asks him questions of this sort,
and will not let him sleep of nights till he answers them.
The point of the dialogue lies in the utter incapacity of
Hippias, for all his wide information and practical
ability, to grasp an abstract idea, and in his gradual
disgust at the coarse language and outrageous conduct
v/hich Socrates imputes to the imaginary friend.
A change in the manner of these mimes comes with
the events of 404-403 B.C. We could be sure even without
the testimony of Letter VII. that Plato must have looked
with eager expectation at the attempt of the Thirty to
" stay but for a moment the pride of the accursed
Demos," ^ and introduce a genuine aristocracy ; he must
have been bitterly disappointed when their excesses
*' made the Demos seem gold in comparison!' His two
kinsmen fell in the streets fighting against their country-
men ; their names were universally execrated by the
Athens of the Restoration. Plato had loved Charmides,
and chooses a characteristic imaginative way to defend
his memory. The Thirty were guilty of y^Spt? — ' pride,'
* intemperance,' whatever we call it. Admitt'^d ; what is
their excuse ? That they never knew any more than any
one else what aoxppoawr] ('soberness,' ' healthy-minded-
ness ') was. Plato goes back from the slain traitor Char-
mides to the Charmides of 430 ; a boy full of promise
and of all the ordinary qualities that men praise — nobly
born, very handsome, docile, modest, eager to learn.
Socrates affects to treat him for a headache ; but you
cannot treat the head without the body, nor the body
without the soul. Is his soul in health ? Has he
^ Alleged epitaph of Critias.
404 AND 399 297
aQ)(f)poavvT) ? In the result, of course, it appears that
no one knows what this health of soul is. Charmides
seems to be full of cyw^poavvq ; his friends are sure of
it ; but his hold must be precarious of a thing which he
does not really know. " The sorrow of it is to think how
you, being so fair in shape, and besides that so sober in soul,
will perhaps have no help in life from that Soberness." He
determines to come to Socrates and try with him to
learn the real nature of it. Critias agrees ; but Critias
himself is an influence as well as Socrates, and ^^ when
Critias intends to make some attempt and is in the mood for
violence, no man living can withstand him!'
In 399 came the event which shadowed all Plato's
life, the execution of Socrates. We do not know what
he did at the time ; the Phcsdo says that " Plato was
away through sickness^' but that may be merely due
to the artistic convention which did not allow the
writer himself to appear in his work. For us Socrates's
death means an outburst of passionate and fiery writing
from Plato, and an almost complete disappearance of
the light-hearted mockery of his earlier dialogues. His
style was practically at its perfection by 399 : the
linguistic tests seem to show that he had already com-
posed his skit on Rhetorical Showpieces, the MenexenUs;
his masterpiece of mere dramatic work, the Protagoras,
with its nine characters, its full scenic background, its
subtle appreciation of different points of view ; the
Euthydemus, wath its broadly-comic satire on the Eristic
sophists ; and the Cratylus, which discusses the nature
of language in as serious a spirit as could be expected
before the subject had become a matter of science.
The Apology, Crito, EutJiypliro, Gorgias, Phcedo, are all
directly inspired by Socrates's death. The first, the only
298 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
philosophical work of Plato that is not a dialogue, pur-
ports to be Socrates's defence at his trial, but is, in
fact, neither a speech for a real court nor an answer
to a legal accusation, but a glorification of a great
man's whole character in the face of later Athenian
rumours. It cannot have been written for some years
after 399. The Crito is in the same spirit ; it tells how
Crito had arranged for Socrates to escape from prison,
and how Socrates would not evade or disobey the laws.
The Euthyphro is a slight sketch, framed on the usual
plan : people were ready to put Socrates to death for
impiety, when no one really knew what piety was. The
Phcedo gives the last hours in prison, the discourse on the
immortality of the soul, and the drinking of the poison.
It is realistic in every detail, but the realism is softened
partly by the essential nobleness of the actors, partly
by an artistic device which Plato loved in the middle
period of his work : the conversation is not given
directly, it is related by Phaedo, who had been present,
to one Echecrates of Phlius, some years after, and far
from Athens. "There is nothing in any tragedy ancient
or modern," says the late Master of Balliol, " nothing
in poetry or history (with one exception), like the last
hours of Socrates in Plato." Very characteristic is the
lack of dogmatism or certainty : one argument after
another is brought up, followed intently, and then, to
the general despair, found wanting ; that which is ulti-
mately left unanswered is of a metaphysical character,
like the Kantian position that the Self, not being in
Time, cannot be destroyed in Time. ' Soul ' is that by
which things live ; when things die, it is by being
separated from Soul : therefore Soul itself cannot be
conceived dead. It is an argument that carries conviction
PLATO ON THE DEATH OF SOCRATES 299
to minds of a particular quality in speculative moments.
The ordinary human comment upon it is given by Plato
in that last moment of intolerable strain, when Phaedo
veils his face, and Crito starts to his feet, and '' Apollo-
dorus, who had never ceased weeping all the time, burst
out in a loud and angry cry which broke down every one
but Socrates!'
As for the Gorgias, it seems to fulfil a prophecy put
into the mouth of Socrates in the Apology: ''You have
killed me because you thought to escape from giving an
account of your lives. But you will be disappointed. TJiere
are others to convict you, accusers whom I held back when you
knew it not ; they will be Jiarsher inasmuch as they are
younger, and you will wince the more." The Gorgias is full
of the sting of recent suffering. It begins by an inquiry
into the nature of Rhetoric ; it ends as an indictment of
all * rhctores ' and politicians and the whole public life of
Athens. Rhetoric is to real statesmanship as cookery is
to medicine ; it is one of the arts of pleasing or ' flattery.'
There are two conceivable types of statesman : the true
counsellor, who will oppose the sovereign when he goes
wrong ; and the false, who will make it his business from
childhood to drink in the spirit of the sovereign, to
understand instinctively all his likes and dislikes. He
will be the tyrant's favourite, or the great popular leader,
according to circumstances, but always and every-
where a mere flatterer, bad and miserable. "He will kill
your true counsellor, anyhow," retorts Callicles, the advo-
cate of evil, "if he gives trouble!" "As if I did not
know t/tat," answers Socrates — "that a bad man can kill a
good!" Callicles admits that all existing politicians are
of the worse type, imitators of the sovereign, but holds
that Themistocles and Kimon and Pericles were true
300 LITERATURE OE ANCIENT GREECE
statesmen. ^^ All flatterers, cooks, confectioners, tavern-
keepers !" answers Socrates; ''Whom have they made
better? They have filled the city with harbours, docks,
walls, tributes, and such trash, instead of temperance and
righteousness!" They have made the city bloated and
sick ; when the crisis comes, the city will know how
it has been deceived, and tear in pieces its present
flatterers! The dialogue breaks into four main theses:
It is worse to do than to suffer wrong ; it is better to
be punished for wrong done than not to be punished;
we do not what we will, but what we desire ; to be,
and not to seem, is the end of life. It is characteristic
of Plato that anger against the world never makes him
cynical, but the reverse : he meets his griefs by harder
thinking and more determined faith in his highest
moral ideal. He speaks in the Phcedo of men who are
made misanthropic by disappointments ; " It is bad that,
to hate your fellow-men; but it is worse to hate Reason
and the Ideal!' He fell, like Carlyle, and perhaps like
Shakespeare, into the first error ; he never came near the
second.
The next dialogue, Meno, on the old question " whether
Goodness is Teachable," still bears the stamp of Socrates's
death in the introduction of Anytus and the rather cruel
references to his son (see above, p. 176). But pure
speculation predominates, especially the theory of Ideas,
which w^as already prominent in the Phcedo. The Lysis,
on Friendship, is an unimportant work ; Plato could
only treat that subject under the deeper name of Love.
This he does in two dialogues which stand apart, even in
Plato, for a certain glamour that is all their own. The
Phczdrus comes later ; the Symposium marks the close
of this present period. If the claim were advanced that
THE SYMPOSiyM 301
the Symposium was absolutely the highest work of prose
fiction ever composed, most perfect in power, beauty,
imaginative truth, it would be hard to deny it ; nor is
it easy to controvert the metaphysician who holds it
to be the deepest word yet spoken upon the nature
of Love ; but in it, as in almost all Plato, there is no
enjoyment for him who has not to some extent learnt
' Hellenisch zu empfinden.' We will only notice one
point in its composition ; it is the last echo of 399.
The spirit of the Charmides has come back, in a stronger
form ; we reach all the splendour of the Symposium only
by crossing the gulf of many deaths, by ignoring so-
called facts, by seeing through eyes to which the things
of the world have strange proportions. Of the characters,
some are as little known to us as Callicles was ; of the
rest, Agathon, the triumphant poet, the idol of Athens,
who gives the banquet in honour of his first tragic vic-
tory, has died long since, disappointed and a semi-exile,
in Macedon ; Phajdrus has turned false to philosophy
— * lost,' as Plato says in another place ; Socrates has
been executed as a criminal ; Alcibiades shot to death
by barbarian assassins. Aristophanes had been, in Plato's
belief, one of the deadliest of Socrates's accusers. It is
a tribute to that Periclean Athens which Plato loves to
blacken, that he always goes back to it to find his ideal
meetings and memories. The Symposium seems like
one of those ^^ glimpses of the outside of the sky " in the
Phcedrus, which the soul catches before its bodily birth,
and which it is always dimly struggling to recover. We
get back to it through that Apollodorus whose sobs
broke the argument of the Phcedo ; he is nicknamed
'the Madman' now, a solitary man, savage against all
the world except Socrates. It is he who tells Glaucon,
21
302 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
Plato's brother, the story of the Banquet. Not that he
was there himself ; it was long before his time, as it
was before Glaucon's ; but he heard it from Aristodemus,
" a little unshod man " who had followed Socrates. So, by
indirect memories, we reach the Banquet. We hear the
various accounts of the origin and meaning of Love, at
last that learnt by Socrates from the Mantinean prophetess
Diotima. Love is the child of Poverty and Power {tropo'i) ;
the object of Love is not Beauty but Eternity, though
it is only in that which is beautiful that Love can bear
fruit. The lover begins by loving some one beautiful
person ; then he feels bodily beauty everywhere, then
^^ beautiful souls and deeds and habits," till at last he
can open his eyes to "///^ great ocean of the beautiful" in