Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/213

 ARISTOPHANES. 195 to give a very evident proof of that unwillingness to shake off modern associations which we have already deprecated ^ The ob- ject of Aristophanes was one most worthy of a wise and good man ; it was to cry down the pernicious quackery which was forcing its way into Athens, and polluting, or drying up, the springs of public and private virtue; which had turned religion into impudent hypo- crisy, and sobriety of mind into the folly of word-wisdom ; and which was the cause alike of the corruption of Tragedy, and of the downfal of the state. He is not to be blamed for his method of opposing these evils: it was the only course open to him; the dema- gogues had introduced the comus into the city, and he tm-ned it against them, till it repented them that they had ever used such an instrument. So far, then, from charging Aristophanes with immo- rality, we would repeat, in the words which a great and a good man of our own days used when speaking of his antitype Rabelais, that the morality of his works is of the most refined and exalted kind, however little worthy of praise their manners may be^, and, on the whole, we would fearlessly recommend any student, who is not so imbued with the lisping and drivelling mawkishness of the present day as to shudder at the ingTedients with which the necessities of the time have forced the great Comedian to dress up his golden truths, to peruse and re-peruse Aristophanes, if he would know either the full force of the Attic dialect, or the state of men and manners at Athens, in the most glorious days of her history^. ^ Above, pp. 7, 8. 2 Coleridge's Table Talk, I. p. 178. 3 The admiration which all time scholars have felt and expressed for Aristophanes, will survive the attacks of certain modern detractors. Among these, Hartung, in his Euripides restitutus, has endeavoured to exalt that tragedian at the expense of the great author of the Frogs, whom he assails in the most abusive language (i. 380, 476). The disapprobation of the poetry and politics of Euripides, which Aristophanes so strongly avowed, is not incompatible with the imitation of his style, which he frankly admitted in his 'LK-qva^ KaTaa,aj3duoucraL (above, p. 169^. And with regard to another charge, it is quite impossible, with the fragmentary evidence before us, to strike the balance of mutual obligation between Eupolis and Aristophanes. See Bernhardy, Grundriss, li. p. 973. 13—2