Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/209

 ARISTOPHANES. 191 hear of liim until some years after the return of Thrasybulus. From the concluding period of his literary history, only two Come- dies have come down to us complete. And both of these present to us a very different state of things from that which had prevailed during the Peloponnesian war. While democracy had revived with some of its worst abuses, and while demagogues, like Agyrrhius, were leading the populace into the most whimsical extravagances, the educated class had learned to express with boldness the feelings of disgust and contempt with Avhich this wild republicanism had inspired them. This anti-democratic tendency was fostered by the writings of some able men attached to the government of the thirty tyrants, among whom the most eminent was Plato. Connected with Critias by the ties of blood, and a near relation of the Char- mides, who fell fighting against the party of Thrasybulus, he had but little sympathy with the restored democracy at Athens; and when his teacher Socrates had been put to death in b. c. 399, after a prosecution instituted by men connected with the popular party, Plato retired to Megara, and did not return to Athens till after some four years spent in foreign travel. The feelings of despair with which he regarded all existing forms of government are re- corded in an epistle written about this time^ and it has been fairly argued^ that he must have published soon afterwards at least the first sketch of his Republic, in which his object is to maintain by the elaborate picture of an ideal government the thesis laid down in the epistle, namely, that the only remedy for the miseries of mankind must be sought in the establishment of a truly philoso- phical aristocracy. One of the most offensive features in Plato's ideal Hepublic is his proposal for a community of property and wives, and the supposition that the original edition, containing tlie first six books^ was given to the public soon after B.C. 395, is strongly supported by the statement of the old grammarians^, that this work is ridiculed by Aristophanes in his Ecclesiazusce which appeared in B.C. 392, and in which Plato is mentioned, as he is also in the Flutus, by a diminutive of his original name Aristocles^. 1 Plato, Fpist. VII. pp. 324 B, sqq., especially 326 A, B. 2 By Professor Thompson. See our Hlstonj of the Literature of Greece, Vol. ii. pp. 211 sqq. ■* History of the Literature of Greece, ii. p. 245. 5 Ecclesiaz. 646; Plutus, 3 [3.
 * Diog. Laert. iii. 23; Herodian, apud Etjm. M. p. 142 r.