Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/453

431 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 431 under the name of Baptce, (winch seems to have beim borrowed from a mystic rite of baptism which they practised,) as worshippers of a bar- barian deity Cotys or Cotytto, whose wild worship was celebrated with the din of load music, and was made a cloak for all sorts of debauchery ; and the picture given of these rites in the piece, if we may judge from what Juvenal says,* must have been very powerful and impressive. Eupolis composed two plays which obviously had some connexion with one another, and which represented the political condition of Athens at the time ; the one in its domestic, the other in its external relations. In the former, which was called the Demi, the boroughs of Attica, of which the whole people consisted, (ot ov/uot,) formed the persons of the chorus ; and Myronides, a distinguished general and statesman of the time of Pericles, who had survived the great men of his own day, and now in extreme old age felt that he stood alone in the midst of a dege- nerate race, was represented as descending to the other world to restore to Athens one of her old leaders ; and he does in fact bring back Solon, Miltiades, and Pericles. t The poet contrived, no doubt, to construct a very agreeable plot by a portraiture of these men, in which respect for the greatness of their characters was combined with many merry jests, and by exhibiting, on the other side, in the most energetic manner, the existing state of Athens, destitute as she then was of good statesmen and generals. From some fragments it appears that the old heroes felt very uncomfortable in this upper world of ours, and that the chorus had to intreat them most earnestly not to give up the state-affairs and the army of Athens to a set of effeminate and presumptuous young men : at the conclusion of the piece, the chorus offers up to the spirits of the heroes, with all proper ceremonies, the wool-bound olive boughs, (tl^ecnuii'ai,) by which, according to the religious rites of the Greeks, it had supported its supplications to them, and so honours them as gods. In the Poleis, the chorus consisted of the allied or rather tributary cities ; the island of Chios, which had always remained true to Athens, and was therefore better treated than the others, stood advantageously prominent among them, and Cyzicus in the Propontis brought up the rear. Beyond this little is known about the connexion of the plot. § 3. Among the remaining comic poets of this time, Crates stands most prominently forward, because he differs most from the others. From being an actor in Cratinus' plays, Crates had risen to the rank of • f That Myronides brings up Pericles is clear from a comparison of Plutarch, Pericl. 21, with the passages of Aristides, Platonius, and others, (Raspe dc Eupolid. Avpoi; et WoKiirii. Lips. 1832.) Pericles asks Myronides, " Why he brings him back to life? are there no good people in Athens! if his son by Aspasia is not a great statesman V and so forth. Prom this it is clear that it was Myronides who had conveyed him from the other world.
 * Juvenal, II. 91.