Page:Aristophanes (Collins).djvu/90

80 whose round and protuberant body made his very friends liken him to the figures of Silenus,—who went about barefooted, unwashed, and in shabby clothes, and would sometimes stand for half an hour in a public thoroughfare as it were wrapt in a dream? There is surely no need to imagine that the comic dramatist had any personal grudge against the philosopher, or any special horror of his particular teaching. Such an artist could hardly have helped caricaturing him, if he had been his personal friend.

The opening scene in this comedy is an interior. It represents a room in the house of Strepsiades, a well-to-do citizen, in which he and his son Pheidippides are discovered occupying two pallet-beds. The household slaves are supposed to be sleeping in an outer room, the door of which is open. So much of the antecedents of the drama as is required to be known in order to its ready comprehension come out at once in the soliloquy of the anxious father.

Str. (yawning in his bed). O—h!

Great Jove, how terribly long the nights are now!

Interminable! will it never be day, I wonder?

I'm sure I heard the cock crow long ago.

These slaves are snoring still, the rascals. Ah!

It was not so in the old times of peace.

Curse the war, I say, both for other reasons,

And specially that I daren't punish my own slaves.

And there's that hopeful son of mine can sleep

Sound as a top, the whole night long, rolled up

Like a great sausage there, in five thick blankets.

Well—I suppose I'd as well put my head