Page:Acharnians and two other plays (1909).djvu/14

x The following are the plays of Aristophanes which have come down to us:—

The Acharnians was produced in 425 B.C., the seventh year of the Peloponnesian war. In this play the author pleads the cause of peace, and attacks the democratic war-party. It is the oldest comedy preserved, and quite one of the best. He goes out of his way to attack Euripides, but he betrays a certain amount of caution in dealing with his powerful enemy Kleon. In the following year Aristophanes produced the Knights, the first play which he brought out in his own name. It is simply an attack on Kleon, a shower of abuse in return for the prosecution of 426. It was a brilliant success, and won the first prize. But the next play, the Clouds, was a comparative failure. Our present version is not the original one, which lacked the argument between the Just Cause and the Unjust Cause and the scene at the end in which Socrates' "thinking-shop" is burnt. Aristophanes himself thought very highly of the play, but it is more than probable that the caricature of Socrates is too distorted to have appealed to an audience which knew the original. The Wasps, which appeared in 422, is a return to politics, and is an elaborate satire on the fondness of the Athenians for sitting on juries. The Peace, the next play, has but little interest, save for the parody of the Bellerophon (a lost play of Euripides) with which it opens. It is really an elaborate manifesto in favour of the Peace of Nikias, which gave Athens a temporary respite from the war. Seven years later the Birds was produced. This play is Aristophanes' masterpiece. In genuine humour, in interest, and in imaginative and poetic beauty it far surpasses the others. It appeared at a time of intense excitement at Athens, during the preparations for the Sicilian expedition. For the moment Aristophanes' political opinions were too unpopular to be safe, so the Birds turns away from the turbulent world of war and affairs, and takes refuge in the realm of pure fancy.

The three plays dealing with the "woman question" may be considered together. The Lysistrata and the Thesmophoriazusae were produced in the same year (411 B.C.) Athens was now under an oligarchy, and no references to politics was possible, so Aristophanes tries to