Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/238

 a class-name for the sophists in general than as the proper name of the famous ethical philosopher, with whom Aristophanes would seem to have been on very friendly terms; and though Euripides and Cleon are certainly hit at as persons, no one can read the passages in which they are introduced without observing that they are also general names, the former for the sophistic corrupters of what Aristophanes regarded as the best morals and aesthetic taste of Athens, the latter for the demagogues who at once flattered and enslaved the populace.

In the dearth of extant Athenian comedies it is, of course, impossible to feel certain that this use of abstract and allegorical personages is derived from the earliest practice of the comic stage. But when it is remembered that early Athenian tragedy discloses the same impersonal tendency alike in its characters and its ethical principles, when it is farther remembered that the group-nature of the chorus in comedy as in tragedy easily lends itself to impersonal and allegorical uses, and when the weakness of personality is found to be one of the most striking points of likeness in all early communities, it may be regarded as highly probable that this characteristic of the old comedy is to be taken as a survival from the early social conditions of Attica through the earliest forms of the comic spectacle. Moreover, there is a special reason for this survival having become in time the peculiar property of the comic drama. In tragedy, so long as Athenian average character was rather social than individual, character-types were as free from the grotesque as Justice, Mercy, or any other abstract personages of the medieval morality-play. But just as the development