Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/204

 186 ARISTOPHANES. of tlie old peevish Atlienians, whose delight it was to spend their time in the law-courts, and to live on the judicial fees, which Peri- cles had established, and which Cleon was pledged to maintain. There are many points in which the Clouds and the Wasjos supple- ment one another, and there is a unity of design between them, which cannot be mistaken. A father and his son are the principal characters in both. In the Wasjjs, the father Philocleon, who, as his name denotes, is warmly attached to Cleon, has surrendered the management of his affairs to his son Bdelycleon, indicated by his name as loathing and detesting that demagogue. The son regrets his father's perverse fondness for judicial business, and weans him from it, partly by establishing a law-court at home, in which a dog- is tried for stealing a cheese, with all the circumstances of a regular process in the dicasterion, and partly by leading him to indulge in a life of sensual enjoyment. And as Strepsiades in the Clouds has reason to regret the sophistical training, which he procures for his dissipated son, so Bdelycleon in the Wasjw repents of the conse- quences of the curative treatment to which he had subjected his father. An eminent modern scholar has pronounced the Wasps one of the most perfect of the plays of Aristophanes and the dra- matic merits of the piece must have been of great intrinsic value, for Racine was able to reproduce it with eminent success as a French Comedy adapted to the usages of his own time 2. In the Peace, which was produced in 419 B.C., the poet returns to the subject of the Acharnians, and insists strongly upon the advantages which might be expected from a reconciliation of the belligerents. The difference, however, between the two plays is very considerable, not only in dramatic merit, but in the nature of the wish for peace which they severally represent. The AcJiar- nians has a strongly conceived dramatic unity, and a great variety of comic incidents, and it represents the wish for peace as not only limited to Athens, but limited also to an individual Athenian, to whom the chorus of his own countrymen is violently opposed. The Peace has really only one incident — the journey to heaven of Try- gseus, a new sort of Bellerophon, mounted on a new sort of Pegasus, in the shape of a dung-beetle ; and the wish for peace is represented as common to all the Greek cities, whose countrymen join in the 1 C. 0. Miiller, Ilut. of Lit. of Gr. ii. p. 38, new ed. 2 Lcs Plaidcurs, acted in i668.