ARISTOPHANES
[ca. 425-400 B.C.]
The patriotism of Aristophanes was honest, bold, and generally wise. He was still below the age at which the law permitted a poet to contend for a dramatic prize, and was therefore compelled to use a borrowed name, when, in the year after the death of Pericles, he produced his first work, in which his chief aim seems to have been to exhibit the contrast between the ancient and the modern manners. In his next, his ridicule was pointed more at the defects or the perversion of political institutions, and perhaps at the democratical system of filling public offices by lot. In both, however, he had probably assailed many of the most conspicuous persons of the day, and either by personal satire, or by attacks on the abuses by which the demagogues throve, he provoked the hostility of Cleon, who endeavoured to crush him by a prosecution. Its nominal ground was, it seems, the allegation, that the poet, who in fact according to some accounts was of Dorian origin, was not legally entitled to the franchise. But the real charge was that in his recent comedy he had exposed the Athenian magistracy to the derision of the foreign spectators. Cleon, however, was baffled; and though the attempt was once or twice renewed, perhaps by other enemies of Aristophanes, it failed so entirely, that he seems to have been soon left in the unmolested enjoyment of public favour; and he not only was encouraged to revenge himself on Cleon by a new piece, in which the demagogue was exhibited in person, and was represented by the poet himself,—who it is said could not find an actor to undertake the part, nor even get a suitable mask made for it,—but he at the same time ventured on an experiment which it seems had never been tried before on the comic stage.
Aristophanes
The people had been accustomed to see the most eminent Athenian statesmen and generals brought forward there and placed in a ludicrous light; but it had never yet beheld its own image set before its eyes as in a mirror, which reflected the principal features of its character, not indeed without the exaggeration which belonged to the occasion, but yet with a truth which could not be mistaken or evaded. This was done in the same play which exposed Cleon’s impudence and rapacity; and the follies and faults of the assembled multitude, which appears under its proper name of Demos, as an old dotard, not void of cunning, though incapable of governing himself, are placed in the strongest relief by the presence of its unworthy favourite, who is introduced, not indeed by name, but so as to be immediately recognised, as a lying, thievish, greedy, fawning, Paphlagonian slave. The poet’s boldness was so far successful, that instead of offending the audience he gained the first prize: but in every other respect he failed of attaining his object; for Cleon, as we have seen, maintained his influence unimpaired to the end of his life, and the people showed as little disposition to reform its habits, and change its measures, as if the portrait it had seen of itself had been no less amiable than diverting. But the issue of this attempt did not deter him from another, which, but for the applause which had crowned the first, might have appeared equally dangerous. As in the Knights he had levelled his satire against the sovereign assembly; in the Wasps, which he exhibited in the year before Cleon’s death, he attacked the other stronghold of his power, the courts of justice, with still keener ridicule.
The vehicles in which Aristophanes conveyed his political lessons, strange as they appear to us, were probably judiciously chosen, as well with the view of pointing the attention of the audience more forcibly to his practical object, as of relieving the severity of his admonitions and censures. As time has spared only a few fragments of the earlier and the contemporary productions of the comic drama, it is only from the report of the ancient critics that we can form any notion of the relation in which he stood to his theatrical competitors. He is said not only to have introduced several improvements in the structure of the old political comedy, by which he brought it to its highest perfection, but to have tempered the bitterness and the grossness of his elder rival Cratinus, who is described as the comic Æschylus. It is not quite clear in what sense this account is to be understood, for it is difficult to conceive that the satire of Cratinus can have been either freer or more licentious. But the difference seems to have consisted in the inimitable grace with which Aristophanes handled every subject which he touched. We are informed, indeed, that even in this quality he was surpassed by Eupolis, who is also said to have shown more vigour of imagination in the invention of his plots. Yet another account represents Eupolis as more nearly resembling Cratinus in the violence and homeliness of his invectives; and the testimony of the philosopher Plato, who in an epitaph called the soul of Aristophanes a sanctuary of the Graces, studied his works as a model of style for the composition of his own dialogues, and honoured him with a place in one of his masterpieces, seems sufficient to prove that at least in the elegance of his taste, and the gracefulness of his humour, he had no equal.
How much Aristophanes was in earnest with his subject, how far he was from regarding it merely as an occasion for the exercise of his art, and how little he was swayed by personal prejudices, which have sometimes been imputed to him, is proved less by the keenness of his ridicule than by the warmth of his affection for Athens, which is manifest even under the comic mask. In his extant plays he nowhere intimates a wish for any change in the form of the Athenian institutions. He only deplores the corruption of the public spirit, points out its signs and causes, and assails the persons who minister to it. It is indeed the Athens of another age that he heartily loves; but that age is no remote antiquity; it is, if not within his own memory, near enough to be remembered by the elder part of his audience. He looks back indeed to the days of Miltiades and Aristides, as the period when the glory of Athens was at its height. But those of Myronides and Thucydides, the rival of Pericles, likewise belong, in his view, to the good old times, which he sighs for; and the evils of his own are of still more recent origin. He traces them to the measures of Pericles; to the position in which he had placed Athens with regard to the subject states, and above all to the war in which he had involved her.
The Peloponnesian War he treats as entirely the work of Pericles, and he chooses to ascribe it to his fears for his own safety, or to the influence of Aspasia; and to consider the quarrel with Megara as only the occasion or colour for it. The war he regards as the main foundation of the power of such demagogues as Cleon and Hyperbolus. If peace were only restored, he hopes that the mass of the people would return to its rural occupations and to its ancient tastes and habits; that the assembly and the courts of justice would no longer hold out the same attractions; that litigation would abate, and the trade of the sycophants decay. Cleon is reproached in the Knights with having caused the Spartan overtures to be rejected, because he knew that it was by the war he was enabled to plunder the subject cities, and that if the people were released from the confinement of the city walls, and once more to taste the blessings of peace and of a country life, he should no longer find it subservient to his ends. Hence we may perhaps conclude that when, at the end of the same play, Demos (the personified people) is introduced as newly risen out of a magic cauldron, restored to the vigour and comeliness of youth, in a garb and port worthy of the companion of Aristides and Miltiades, his eyes opened to his past errors, and with the purpose of correcting them, the poet did not conceive the change thus represented as hopeless, and still less meant to intimate that it was impossible.
It was not without reason that Aristophanes, in common with all Athenians who loved and regretted the ancient times, regarded the sophistical circles with abhorrence, not only as seminaries of demagogues and sycophants, but as schools of impiety and licentiousness. That the attention of the Athenian youth should be diverted from military and athletic exercises, from the sports of the field, and from the enjoyment of that leisure which had once been esteemed the most precious privilege of a Greek freeman, to sedentary studies, which at the best only inflated them with self-conceit, and stimulated them to lay aside the diffidence which befitted their age, and come forward prematurely in public, to exhibit their new acquirements and to supplant the elder and graver citizens on the bema, or to harass them before the popular tribunals: this in itself he deemed a great evil.
In the last scene of the Knights, one of the resolutions which Demos adopts is that he will bar the agora and the Pnyx against the beardless youths who now pass so much of their time in places of public resort, where they amuse themselves with discussing the merits of the orators in technical language, and will force them to go a-hunting, instead of making decrees. But it was a still more alarming evil, that, by way of preparation for this pernicious result, the religious belief of the young Athenians should be unsettled, their moral sentiments perverted, their reverence for the maxims and usages of antiquity extinguished; that subjects which had never before been contemplated but at an awful distance—the being and nature of the gods, the obligations arising from domestic and civil relations—should be submitted to close and irreverent inspection. It was according to the view of Aristophanes a matter of comparatively little moment, what turn such discussions happened to take, or what was the precise nature of the sophistical theories. The mischief was already done, when things so sacred had once been treated as subjects for inquiry and argument. But he perceived the evil much more clearly than the remedy. He would fain have carried his countrymen half a century backward, and have forced them to remain stationary at the stage which they had then reached in their intellectual progress; and it seems as if he wished to see the schools of the new philosophy forcibly suppressed, and with this view attempted to direct popular indignation against them. The only case in which this attempt succeeded was one in which the poet himself, if he had been better informed, must have desired it should fail.