Page:Aristophanes (Collins).djvu/180

170

And asked the priest, of course. But now no soul

Pays either vows or sacrifice, or comes

To the temple—save to shoot their rubbish there.

Car. (half aside). You take your tithe of that, I warrant me.

Chremylus, whose good fortune in entertaining such a desirable guest has put him into good-humour with all the world, comforts the despairing official. The true Father Protector—the deity whom all men acknowledge—is here, he tells him, in the house. They mean to set him up permanently at Athens, in his proper place—the Public Treasury. And he shall be the minister of the new worship, if he likes to quit the service of Jupiter. The priest gladly consents, and an extempore procession is at once formed upon the stage, into which the old lady who has lost her lover is pressed, and persuaded to carry a slop-pail upon her head, to represent the maidens who, on such occasions, bore the lustral waters for the inauguration. Cario and the Chorus bring up the rear in an antic dance, and they proceed to establish at Athens, with all due formalities, the worship of Wealth alone.

This play, as we now have it (for it had been brought out in a different form twenty years before), shows evident signs of a transition in the character of Athenian comedy. It is less extravagant, and more domestic, and so far approaches more nearly to what is called the "New" Comedy, of which we know little except from a few fragmentary remains and from its Roman adapters, but of which our modern drama is the result. Possibly, now that the great war was over,