The Historians' History of the World 04

The vehicles in which Aristophanes conveyed his political lessons, strange as they appear to us, were probably judiciously chosen, as well with the view of pointing the attention of the audience more forcibly to his practical object, as of relieving the severity of his admonitions and censures. As time has spared only a few fragments of the earlier and the contemporary productions of the comic drama, it is only from the report of the ancient critics that we can form any notion of the relation in which he stood to his theatrical competitors. He is said not only to have introduced several improvements in the structure of the old political comedy, by which he brought it to its highest perfection, but to have tempered the bitterness and the grossness of his elder rival Cratinus, who is described as the comic Æschylus. It is not quite clear in what sense this account is to be understood, for it is difficult to conceive that the satire of Cratinus can have been either freer or more licentious. But the difference seems to have consisted in the inimitable grace with which Aristophanes handled every subject which he touched. We are informed, indeed, that even in this quality he was surpassed by Eupolis, who is also said to have shown more vigour of imagination in the invention of his plots. Yet another account represents Eupolis as more nearly resembling Cratinus in the violence and homeliness of his invectives; and the testimony of the philosopher Plato, who in an epitaph called the soul of Aristophanes a sanctuary of the Graces, studied his works as a model of style for the composition of his own dialogues, and honoured him with a place in one of his masterpieces, seems sufficient to prove that at least in the elegance of his taste, and the gracefulness of his humour, he had no equal.

How much Aristophanes was in earnest with his subject, how far he was from regarding it merely as an occasion for the exercise of his art, and how little he was swayed by personal prejudices, which have sometimes been imputed to him, is proved less by the keenness of his ridicule than by the warmth of his affection for Athens, which is manifest even under the comic mask. In his extant plays he nowhere intimates a wish for any change in the form of the Athenian institutions. He only deplores the corruption of the public spirit, points out its signs and causes, and assails the persons who minister to it. It is indeed the Athens of another age that he heartily loves; but that age is no remote antiquity; it is, if not within his own memory, near enough to be remembered by the elder part of his audience. He looks back indeed to the days of Miltiades and Aristides, as the period when the glory of Athens was at its height. But those of Myronides and Thucydides, the rival of Pericles, likewise belong, in his view, to the good old times, which he sighs for; and the evils of his own are of still more recent origin. He traces them to the measures of Pericles; to the position in which he had placed Athens with regard to the subject states, and above all to the war in which he had involved her.

The Peloponnesian War he treats as entirely the work of Pericles, and he chooses to ascribe it to his fears for his own safety, or to the influence of Aspasia; and to consider the quarrel with Megara as only the occasion or colour for it. The war he regards as the main foundation of the power of such demagogues as Cleon and Hyperbolus. If peace were only restored, he hopes that the mass of the people would return to its rural occupations and to its ancient tastes and habits; that the assembly and the courts of justice would no longer hold out the same attractions; that litigation would abate, and the trade of the sycophants decay. Cleon is reproached in the Knights with having caused the Spartan overtures to be rejected, because he knew that it was by the war he was enabled to plunder the subject cities, and that if the people were released from the confinement of the city walls, and once more to taste the blessings of peace and of a country life, he should no longer find it subservient to his ends. Hence we may perhaps conclude that when, at the end of the same play, Demos (the personified people) is introduced as newly risen out of a magic cauldron, restored to the vigour and comeliness of youth, in a garb and port worthy of the companion of Aristides and Miltiades, his eyes opened to his past errors, and with the purpose of correcting them, the poet did not conceive the change thus represented as hopeless, and still less meant to intimate that it was impossible.