Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/422

400 400 HISTORY OF THE features of which were exaggerated even to caricature, yet so that par- ticulai persons, when such were brought upon the stage, might at once be recognized. It is well known that Aristophanes found great diffi- culty in inducing the mask-makers (gkevottoioi) to provide him with a likeness of the universally dreaded demagogue, Cleon, whom he intro- duces in his Knights. The costume of the chorus in a comedy of Aris- tophanes went farthest into the strange and fantastic. His choruses of birds, wasps, clouds, &c, must not of course be regarded as having consisted of birds, wasps, &c. actually represented, but, as is clear from numerous hints from the poet himself, of a mixture of the human form with various appendages borrowed from the creatures we have men- tioned ;* and in this the poet allowed himself to give special promi- nence to those parts of the mask which he was most concerned about, and for which he had selected the mask : thus, for example, in the Wasps, who are designed to represent the swarms of Athenian judges, the sting was the chief attribute, as denoting the style with which the judges used to mark down the number of their division in the wax-tablets ; these waspish judges were introduced humming and buzzing up and down, now thrusting out, and now drawing in an immense spit, which was attached to them by way of a gigantic sting. Ancient poetry was suited, by its vivid plastic representations, to create a comic effect by the first sight of its comic chorus and its various motions on the stage ; as in a play of Aristophanes (the ri/pac), some old men come on the stage, and casting off their age in the form of a serpent's skin (which was also called yi'ipac), immediately after conducted themselves in the most riotous and intemperate manner. § 6. Comedy had much that was peculiarly its own in the arrange- ment, the movements, and the songs of the chorus. The authorities agree in stating the number of persons in the comic chorus at twenty- four : it is obvious that the complete chorus of the tragic tetralogy, (con- sisting of forty-eight persons,) was divided into two, and comedy kept its moiety undivided. Consequently, comedy, though in other respects placed a good deal below tragedy, had, nevertheless, the advantage of a more numerous chorus by this, that comedies were always represented separately, and never in tetralogies ; whence it happened also, that the comic poets were much less prolific in plays than the tragic. t This chorus, when it appeared in regular order, came on in rows of six per- sons, and as it entered the stage sang the parodos, which, however, was never so long or so artificially constructed as it was in many tragedies. Still less considerable were the stasima, which the chorus sings at the Philostratus. Imagines, I. 3. With all Aristophanes' long career, only 54 were attributed to him, of which four were said to be spurious — consequently, he only wrote half as many plays as Sophocles. Compare above, chap. XXIV. § 2.
 * Like the ATvm with beasts' heads (iEsop's fables) in the picture described by