Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/449

427 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 427 people hoped that, according to an old oracle, the wildest resolution •which they made would turn out to their benefit. The women then establish an excellent Utopia, in which property and wives are to be in common, and the interests of the ugly of both sexes are specially pro- vided for, a conception which is followed out into all its absurd conse- quences with a liberal mixture of humour and indecency. From this combination of a serious thought, by way of foundation, with the boldest creations of a riotous imagination, the Ecclesiazusac must be classed with the works which appeared during the vigour of Attic comedy : but the technical arrangement shows, in a manner which cannot be mistaken, the poverty and thriftiness of the state at this time.* The chorus is obviously fitted out very parsimo- niously ; its masks were easily made, as they represented only Athenian women, who at first appear with beards and men's cloaks; besides, it re- quired but little practice, as it had but little to sing. The whole parabasis is omitted, and its place is supplied by a short address, in which the chorus, before it leaves the stage, calls upon the judges to decide fairly and impartially. These outward deviations from the original plan of the old comedy are in the Plutus combined with great alterations in the internal struc- ture ; and thus furnish a plain transition to the middle comedy, as it is called. The extant Plutus is not that which the poet produced in 01. 92, 4. b.c. 408, but that which came out twenty years later in 01. 97, 4. b. c. 388, and was the last piece which the aged poet brought forward himself; for two plays which he composed subsequently, the Cocalus and JEolosicon, were brought out by his son Araros. In the extant Plutus, Aristophanes tears himself away altogether from the great political interests of the state. His satire in this piece is, in part, uni- versally applicable to all races and ages of men, for it is directed against defects and perversities which attach themselves to our every-day life ; and, in part, it is altogether personal, as it attacks individuals selected from the mass at the caprice of the poet, in order that the jokes may take a deeper and wider root. The conception on which it is based is of lasting significance: the god of riches has, in his blindness, fallen into the hands of the worst of men, and has himself suffered greatly thereby : a worthy, respectable citizen, Chrcmylus, provides for the re- covery of his sight, and so makes many good people prosperous, and reduces many knaves to poverty. From tire more general nature of the fable it follows that the persons also have the general character of their condition and employments, in which the piece approximates to the manner of the middle comedy, as it also does in the more decent, less less expensive letery year. See Boeckh, Public Economy of Athens, book iii. § T±.
 * The ehoregue were not discontinued, but people endeavoured to make them