Callias: A Tale of the Fall of Athens

by Alfred John Church

Then he tries with the first lines of a third

“Great Bacchus, who with wand and fawn-skin decked,
In pine-groves of Parnassus, plies the dance,
And leads the revel—”
“Lost a little flask.”

The reader may have had enough. It will suffice to give the result of the contest. All the tests have been applied. Euripides, as a last resource, reminds the judge that he has sworn to take him back with him.

Bacchus replies:

“My tongue hath sworn; yet Æschylus I choose.”

A cruel cut, for it is an adaptation of one of the poet’s own lines (from the Hippolytus) when the hero, taunted with the oath that he had taken and is about to violate, replies:

“My tongue hath sworn it, but my mind’s unsworn.”

When the curtain rose from the floor and hid the last scene, it was manifest that the “Frogs” of Aristophanes, son of Philippus, of the tribe Pandionis, and the township Cydathenæa, was a success. Of course there were malcontents among the audience. Euripides had a good many partisans in young Athens. They admired his ingenuity, his rhetoric, and the artistic quality of his verse, in which beauty for beauty’s sake, quite apart from any moral purpose, seemed to be aimed at. They were captivated by the boldness and novelty of his treatment of things moral and religious. Æschylus they considered to be old-fashioned and bigoted. Hence among the seats allotted to the young men there had been some murmurs of dissent while the performance was going on, and now there was a good deal of adverse criticism. And there were some among the older men who were scarcely satisfied. The fact was that Comedy was undergoing a change, the change which before twenty more years had passed was to turn the Old Comedy into the Middle and the New, or to put the matter briefly, to change the Comedy of Politics into the Comedy of Manners.

“This is poor stuff,” said an old aristocrat of this school, “poor stuff indeed, after what I remember in my younger days. Why can’t the man leave Euripides alone, especially now he is dead, and won’t bother us with any more of his plays? There are plenty of scoundrel politicians who might to much more purpose come in for a few strokes of the lash. But he daren’t touch the fellows. Ah! it was not always so. I remember the play he brought out eighteen years ago. The ‘Knights’ he called it. That was something like a Comedy! Cleon was at the very height of his power, for he had just made that lucky stroke at Pylos[6]. But Aristophanes did not spare him one bit for that. He could not get any one to take the part; he could not even get a mask made to imitate the great man’s face. So he took the part himself, and smeared his face with the lees of wine. Cleon was there in the Magistrates’ seats. I think we all looked at him as much as we looked at the stage. Whenever there was a hard hit—and, by Bacchus, how hard the hits were!—all the theatre turned to see how he bore it. He laughed at first. Then we saw him turn red and pale—I was close by him and I heard him grind his teeth. Good heavens! what a rage he was in! Well, that is the sort of a play I like to see, not this splitting words, and picking verses to pieces, just as some schoolmaster might do.”

But, in spite of these criticisms, the greater part of the audience were highly delighted with what they had seen and heard. The comic business, with its broad and laughable effects, pleased them, and they were flattered by being treated as judges of literary questions. And the curious thing was that they were not unfit to be judges of such matters. There never was such a well-educated and keen-witted audience in the world. They knew it, and they dearly liked to be treated accordingly. The judges only echoed the popular voice when at the end of the festival they bestowed the first prize upon Aristophanes.