Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/423

Rh Knights, the Clouds, the Wasps, the Peace, and the Birds (between B.C. 425 and 413) are full of political allusion and denunciations. They are all on the side of peace and against the demagogues (especially Cleon), and anything else which the poet regards as characteristic of the democratic or war party. Thus in the Clouds he attacks the supposed atheistic and immoral tendency of the teaching of certain Sophists, of whom Socrates is unfairly made the representative. In the Wasps he shows up the ill effects of payment to the dicasts. The next two plays, the Thesmophoriazusae and Lysistrata (B.C. 411), join to political suggestions in the same direction a violent attack upon Euripides, which is repeated in the Frogs (B.C. 405). These plays may be classed as the Old Comedy, the distinguishing features of which are unscrupulous attacks upon living men, and a chorus of which the leader addresses the audience in the name of the poet in a long speech called the para- basis full of contemporary allusions. In the Thesmophoriazusae and Lysistrata, however, there is no parabasis, and they are sometimes classed as Middle Comedy. Two other plays remain—the Ecclesiazusae, “Women in Parliament,” and the Plutus (B.C. 392). The political element is much modified in the former, and altogether absent in the latter. They have no parabasis, and they lead the way to a new style of comedy,—a comedy of manners, in which the choric element wholly disappears. This is called the “New Comedy,” of which the chief writer was Menander of Athens (B.C. 342–291), of whom only fragments remain. We, however, have some knowledge of his