Page:Acharnians and two other plays (1909).djvu/49

Rh But the general plan of the play must have included a picture of the abuses and insolence under which the subject states were suffering; an exhibition of the processes of extortion and intimidation which were practised upon them; an exposure of the persons most notoriously guilty of such practices, and probably also of some flagrant instances which were known to have occurred, and which might have been represented on the stage with no other disguise than that of a remote fanciful locality assigned to them in the new imaginary universal Empire of the Athenian Commonwealth. This must have been the service which, as he says, had excited the grateful feelings of the subject states, and their just admiration of the courage of the man "who had risked the perilous enterprise of pleading in behalf of justice, in presence of an Athenian auditory." It is observable that the Poet, after having, with a just feeling of pride and self-estimation, ventured in this way to assert his own merits, immediately after, as if alarmed at his own boldness (like Rabelais or the jesters in Shakespeare, when they are apprehensive of having touched upon too tender a point) makes a sudden escape from the subject, and hurries off into a strain of transcendental nonsense, about the high consideration with which his character and services to the country were regarded by the Persian monarch, and how the Spartans insisted upon obtaining the island of Ægina, from no other motive than a wish to deprive the Athenians of the advantage which they might derive from his poetical admonitions.

Our poet has never as yet

Esteemed it proper or fit,

To detain you with a long

Encomiastic song,

On his own superior wit.

But being abused and accused,

And attacked of late,

As a foe to the state,

He makes an appeal in his proper defence

To your voluble humour and temper and sense,

With the following plea;

Namely that he

Never attempted or ever meant

To scandalise

In any wise

Your mighty imperial government.

Moreover he says,

That in various ways

He presumes to have merited honour and praise,

Exhorting you still to stick to your rights,