Page:Acharnians and two other plays (1909).djvu/47

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That, with their debts and payments long since due,

Have heard their friends insisting and repeating,

"Get off,"—"Keep out of the way;" like the huswife's warning,

That empties a nuisance into the street at night. Lam. And must we bear all this,—in the name of democracy? Dic. Yes, just as long as Lamachus draws his salary. Lam. No matter! Henceforth I devote myself

Against the Peloponnesians, whilst I live,

To assault and harass them by land and sea. Dic. And I proclaim for all the Peloponnesians

And Thebans and Megarians, a free market;

Where they may trade with me, but not with Lamachus.

The Parabasis, in which the Chorus was brought forward to speak in praise or defence of the author, was a portion of the primitive satirical undramatic comedy. In the times of the ancient or (as we should call it, from the name of the only author whose remains have reached us) the Aristophanic comedy, it seems to have been regarded as nearly superfluous; and is seldom introduced without some alleged motive, as in the instance before us; sometimes a burlesque one, as in The Peace.

The present, which is the oldest of the existing plays of Aristophanes, was, as he tells us, the first in which he had introduced a Parabasis. Since his alleged, and probably his real, motive was the circumstance to which he had already alluded when speaking in the assumed character of Dicæopolis, he had reverted to his

This comedy (The Babylonians) seems, as far as we can judge of it from the few fragments that remain, to have been intended, in the first place, as an exposure of existing malpractices and abuses, and, secondly, as a reductio ad absurdum of the extravagant schemes of Athenian ambition; assuming them to be realised, and exhibiting the result.

The progressive aggrandisement of Athens had been marked, from the beginning, by the extortion and oppression practised (with a few honourable exceptions) by her military commanders; Themistocles himself having set the first example. In process of time, as the inferior allied states became gradually subject to the more immediate dominion of Athens, they became exposed to the additional pest of professional informers and venal demagogues, subsisting or enriching themselves by extortion and bribery. This state of things, odious and offensive to the whole Grecian race, disgraceful to the Athenian people, and profitable only to the most worthless and unprincipled among them, was the final unsatisfactory result of their vast efforts and indefatigable activity during two generations, the consummation of the ambitious projects of the most able statesmen of a former age. Meanwhile, at the time when this play (The