Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/351

 AK1STOPHANES. 329 before us enough of his works to enable us to appreciate hii merits; ihough perhaps Eupolis, Ameipsias, Phrynichus, Plato (Comicus), and others, who contended against him at the festivals with alternate victory and defeat, would be found to deserve sim- ilar praise, if we possessed their compositions. Never probably will the full and unshackled force of comedy be so exhibited again. Without having Aristophanes actually before us, it would have been impossible to imagine the unmeasured and unsparing license of attack assumed by the old comedy upon the gods, the in- stitutions, the politicians, philosophers, poets, private citizens spe- cially named, and even the women, whose life was entirely domes- tic, of Athens. With this universal liberty in respect of subject, there is combined a poignancy of derision and satire, a fecundity of imagination and variety of turns, and a richness of poetical expression, such as cannot be surpassed, and such as fully ex- plains the admiration expressed for him by the philosopher Plato, who in other respects must have regarded him with unquestion- able disapprobation. His comedies are popular in the largest sense of the word, addressed to the entire body of male citizens on a day consecrated to festivity, and providing for them amuse- ment or derision with a sort of drunken abundance, out of all persons or things standing in any way prominent before the pub- lic eye. The earliest comedy of Aristophanes was exhibited in 427 B.C., and his muse continued for a long time prolific, since two of the dramas now remaining belong to an epoch eleven years after the Thirty and the renovation of the democracy, about 392 B.C. After that renovation, however, as I have before remarked, the unmeasured sweep and libellous personality of the old comedy was gradually discontinued : the comic chorus was first cut down, and afterwards suppressed, so as to usher in what is commonly termed the Middle Comedy, without any chorus at all. The. " Plutus" of Aristophanes indicates some approach to this new phase ; but his earlier and more numerous comedies, from the " Acharneis," in 425 B.C. to the " Frogs," in 405 B.C., c::ly a few months before the fatal battle of 2Egospotami, exhibit the continuous, unexhausted, untempered flow of the stream first epencd by Kratinus. Such abundance both of tragic and comic poetry, each of first- rate excellence, formed one of the marked features of Atheniai