Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/429

407 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 407 Aristophanes completed in the Clouds what he had attempted in this early play. The second play of Aristophanes was the Babylonians, and was brought out 01. 88, 2. b. c. 426, under the name of Callistratus. This was the first piece in which Aristophanes adopted the bold step of making the people themselves, in their public functions, and with their measures for ensuring the public good, the subject of his comedy. He takes credit to himself, in the parabasis of the Acharnians, for having detected the tricks which the Athenians allowed foreigners, and especially foreign ambassadors, to play upon them, by lending too willing an ear- to their flatteries and misrepresentations. He also maintains that he has shown how democratic constitutions fall into the power of dema- gogues ; and that he has thereby gained a great name with the allies, and, as he says, with humorous rhodomontade, at the court of the Great King himself. The name of the piece is obviously connected with this. AVe infer from the statements of the old grammarians,* that the Baby- lonians, who formed the chorus, were represented as common labourers in the mills, the lowest sort of slaves at Athens, who were branded and were forced to work in the mills by way of punishment ; and that they passcd themselves off as Babylonians, i.e. as ambassadors from Babylon. By this it was presumed that Babylon had revolted against the great king, who was constantly at war with Athens ; and Aristophanes thought that the credulous Athenians might easily be gulled into the belief of something of the kind. The play would therefore be nearly related to that scene in the Acharnia?is, in which the supposed ambassadors of the Persian monarch make their appearance, though the one cannot be con- sidered as a mere repetition of the other. Of course, these fictitious Babylonians were represented as a cheat practised on the Athenian Dennis by the demagogues, who were then (after the death of Pericles) at- the head of affairs ; and Aristophanes bad made Cleon the chief butt for his witty attacks. This comedy was performed at the splendid festival of the great Dionysia, in the presence of the allies and a number of strangers Aho were then at Athens; and we may see, from Glenn's earnest endeavours to revenge himself on the poet, how severely the powerful demagogue smarted under the attack made upon him. He " these are the words of one of the characters in Aristophanes," says Hesychius, " when lie sees the Babylonians from tin null, being astonished at their appearance, and not knowing what to make of it." The verse was clearlj spoken by some one, who was looking at the chorus without knowing what they were intended to repre- sent, and who mistook them for Samians hranded bj Pericles, so that ttoKoy^aftfutros contains a direct allusion to the invention of letters by the Samians. Thai tl Babylonians were intended to represent mill-slaves appears to stand in connexion with the fact that Eucrates, a demagogue powerful at that very time, possessed mills. (Aristoph. Knights, 254.) The piece, however, seems to have In i n directed chieflv against Cleon.
 * Sec especially Hesyehius on the verse : lay/tuii o 17,/jt.o; a; ■roXuyouiu/u.tzri; :