Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/237

 of Homer, as accurately acquainted with legal expressions (in order, of course, to employ them in pettifogging quibbles), and as a zealous partisan of the sophist Thrasymachus, and of Alcibiades, the leader of the frivolous youth of the day." Passing from this earliest but non-extant comedy of Aristophanes to the extant Plutus, which came out nearly forty years later (388 ), and was "the last piece which the aged poet brought forward himself," we are again met by allegory and allegorical personages—Plutus, the god of wealth, Just Man, Poverty. The intervening plays of Aristophanes are full of similar personages—Dêmus (People), the old citizen of Athens, in whom the Athenians are personified in the Knights; Just Argument (Logos) and Unjust Argument, in the Clouds, reminding us of such "characters" as Heresy and Understanding in Calderon's Divine Philothea; War and Tumult in the Peace, itself the name of another allegorical personage. Indeed, as any careful reader of Aristophanes must have observed, many of his apparently real personages dissolve into groups and general types the moment we examine them: such are Dicæopolis in the Acharnians and Trygæus in the Peace, representatives of the Athenian peace-party; Lysistrata, a female representative of the same party, in the Lysistrata; and Praxagora, the female exponent of women's rights in the Ecclesiazousæ. In these and other examples Aristophanic personages turn out, on closer inspection, not to be individuals at all, but only types of a certain class or group. In fact, to such a degree does this class character prevail in Aristophanes' plays, that even living persons do not seem to be introduced simply as persons, but as types of philosophic, poetical, or political thought. Thus the name of Socrates is used in the Clouds rather as