Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/314

290 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 Iophon 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 judgments 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 think the one clever, but I enjoy the other," says Dionysus. Eventually he leaves the decision to his momentary feelings and chooses Æschylus. 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 Browning 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 Ecclêsiazûsæ or 'Women in Parliament.' It reads at first like a parody of the scheme for communism and abolition of the