II. The Origin of Comedy.
Comedy was, in its origin, as seems indeed necessary from its nature, social rather than political. The scenes which the first comic actors aimed at depicting appear, beyond doubt, to have been representations of amusing incidents in the everyday life of ordinary people, and were in no way concerned with state policy; while the personalities with which this form of entertainment originally abounded, were aimed rather at rival actors than at well-known public characters, and had nothing at all in common with political lampoons. It is true that Comedy generally received its chief impulses at times of great popular license under democracies,[206] but this fact really means no more than that, at such periods, the amusements of the people received greater attention than would be the case under a tyranny or an oligarchy. No doubt these extempore slanging-matches became, at an early time already, very general in character, and contained, among other promiscuous allusions, occasional references, probably none too complimentary, to important contemporary events or personages; but that this was not their main feature, nor that which supplied their chief interest, seems shown, inter alia, by the fact that the first artistic development they received at the hands of Epicharmus was by no means in this direction. Nor, indeed, do the earliest Attic comedies appear to have been political in character, the few fragments of them which survive seeming, in every case, to deal with social subjects.[207]
The first writer to make Comedy political—that is, the first writer to give to the “Old” Comedy of Athens that which is, by modern readers, generally regarded as its most essential characteristic—was Cratinus. He, abandoning in great part that endeavour to amuse which had been the primary object of his predecessors, deliberately made use of Comedy as a political party engine, or, as he would perhaps have preferred to call it, as a means of attacking those who did harm to the state.[208] The success of the new element thus imported seems to have been very great; but, at the same time, it must not be supposed that the work of Cratinus was all of this nature. In the first place, some of his plays were of a distinctly general character. Thus the Odysses was a simple parody of the Odyssey of Homer, and, as such, was the distinct forerunner of a class of piece very common in the Social Comedy of the fourth century.[209] The Cleobulinae, with its enigmas, is equally suggestive of another feature of the same period of art. In like manner, the Panoptae, with its attacks on the philosopher Hippo, the Seriphii, with its mythological allusions, and the Horae, with its apparent discussions of tragedy, all point to the direction in which lay the true development of the art of Comedy.[210]
But, popular as the indiscriminate mud-throwing of Cratinus undoubtedly was with a large section of that cultured Athenian audience which one is taught to admire, a certain reaction was, in course of time, almost inevitable; and such a reaction was actually furnished by the comedies of Crates. Crates is described as the first Attic comedian to develop Comedy on the lines of Epicharmus, and to introduce a plot with apparently fictitious or allegorical characters, instead of merely bringing public characters on the stage and making them ridiculous.[211]
From a very early period, therefore, Comedy at Athens falls into two classes, the personal, which is usually also political, and the general or social, though the line of demarcation is not, of course, a very rigid one, since writers of the latter class would seldom feel much hesitation in attacking anyone who had made himself particularly obnoxious to them, even if he were a political character, while those of the former were also frequently compelled, for equally personal reasons, to set a limit to their righteous indignation. Thus Pherecrates, the most important of the actual imitators of Crates,[212] is by no means averse to an occasional personality, while a writer of the very opposite school, Hermippus, was yet the author of the Athenas Gonae.[213] Plato and Aristophanes are, of course, equally striking instances of the same fact occurring at a later date.
From the preceding paragraphs, which might have been considerably extended, had it not lain somewhat outside the present subject to extend them, one fact at least will be abundantly clear. That system of treating subjects rather than persons as material for comedy which is sometimes spoken of as a distinctive feature of “Middle” Comedy (using that term in its chronological sense), had already been in vogue at Athens from the very earliest times; in fact, what are commonly called “Old” and “Middle” Comedy are, in spirit, intimately associated with one another, and the most important differences between them are in purely external matters, brought about by external causes.[214]
This fact will not be without its importance in considering our immediate subject. In the first place, it will cause us to find in the early Athenian comedy two distinct ways of regarding women, which, while contemporaneous, have very little else in common with one another. The comedy of the school of Cratinus,[215] being concerned with public characters and with them alone, naturally ignores women almost entirely.[216] The comedy of the school of Crates, on the other hand, is very similar in its treatment of women to the comedy of the beginning of the fourth century, except that, in so far as the position of women in Athenian society was a less important one in the middle of the fifth century than it was some seventy years later, the female element is not such a pronounced feature of these early works as it is of the later.
A detailed examination of the treatment of women in early comedy, as far as such is possible by means of the fragments, will serve to illustrate the foregoing somewhat general remarks.