Page:Acharnians and two other plays (1909).djvu/15

Rh make up by indecency in the first play and by a witty attack on Euripides in the second. Many years later Aristophanes returned to the subject of the position of women, and wrote the Ecclesiazusae or Women in Parliament. It is really an attack on the communistic ideas which were afloat at the time. Though it contains some witty repartees, it is really the poorest of his plays. In 406 B.C. Euripides died, and the Frogs, which appeared in the following year, was evidently suggested by that event. It is really elaborate literary criticism in the form of a play. As a criticism on Euripides it is preposterously unfair, though the parodies in which it abounds are brilliant. The fun of the opening scenes is in Aristophanes' best vein, and probably of all the comedies it is the one which appeals most to the modern reader. The last of the plays which is preserved, the Plutus, is entirely different from all the rest. It is a satire on human life and on the unjust distribution of wealth. With it we take our leave of the boisterous, hearty, scandalous old comedy, and meet a new kind of play, which tries to tell a story and aims at the delineation of character.

It cannot be doubted that Aristophanes is one of the really great writers of the world; but it is open to question whether the soundness of his political views, his moral earnestness, and his patriotism have not been overrated by his admirers. His motto always is "stare super antiquas vias," and he is ever contrasting the degenerate men of his own day with their grandfathers who fought at Marathon. More often than not he failed to sympathise with what was best in the movements of his time. The earlier years of his life were passed in an Athens which was still "bright and famous," full of the enthusiasm breathed into her by Perikles and his followers; and he lived through the long-drawn agony of the Peloponesian war, which culminated so terribly in the disaster before Syracuse in 413, when every Athenian must have felt like the King of the Epeans in Pindar, who beheld "his rich native land, his own city, sink down beneath fierce fire and blows of iron into the deep abyss of calamity." Aristophanes, it may be, was little affected by this final breakdown of Athenian hopes. His political views prevented him from sympathising