Aristophanes

REV. W. LUCAS COLLINS, M.A.
AUTHOR OF ‘ETONIANA,’ ‘THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS,’ ETC. WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS EDINBURGH AND LONDON MDCCCLXXII
In ‘The Knights,’ ‘The Acharnians,’ ‘The Birds,’ and ‘The Frogs,’ most of the translated extracts are taken, by permission, from the admirable version of those comedies by the late Mr Hookham Frere, and are marked (F.) For all translations not so marked the present writer is responsible.
It is to be regretted that the Comedies of Aristophanes are now less read at our universities than they were some years ago. If one great object of the study of the classics is to gain an accurate acquaintance with one of the most brilliant and interesting epochs in the history of the world, no pages will supply a more important contribution to this knowledge than those of the great Athenian humorist. He lays the flesh and blood, the features and the colouring, upon the skeleton which the historian gives us. His portraits of political and historical celebrities must of course be accepted with caution, as the works of a professional caricaturist; but, like all good caricatures, they preserve some striking characteristics of the men which find no place in their historical portraits, and they let us know what was said and thought of them by irreverent contemporaries. It is in these comedies that we have the Athenians at home; and although modern writers of Athenian history have laid them largely under contribution in the way of reference and illustration, nothing will fill in the outline of the Athens of Cleon and Alcibiades and Socrates so vividly as the careful study of one of these remarkable dramas in the Greek original. One is inclined to place more faith than is usually due to anecdotes of the kind in that which is told of Plato, that when the elder Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, wrote to him to request information as to the state of things at Athens, the philosopher sent him a copy of Aristophanes’s ‘Clouds,’ as the best and most trustworthy picture of that marvellous republic.