After this Balaustion asks Aristophanes if he will commemorate Euripides with them. But his sober mood is gone. He looks about the room, sees things that belong to Euripides, and immediately begins stabbing at him. Balaustion objects, and upon the theme of respect to the dead he begins his usual invective against his rivals, but finally ends by giving respect to Euripides, him whose serenity, he declares, could never with his gibes be disturbed.
After venting this mood of animosity he begins soberly to discuss the origin of comedy. He traces its growth to the point where he found it, and enlarges on the improvements he has made, touching, as always, upon the criticisms of his opposers, and finally arriving at the chief point of difference between himself and Euripides, which he enlarges upon at great length. Here the incidental music breaks in with talk between Balaustion and Euthukles, in which the former rather tries to excuse herself from relating her reply to Aristophanes.
However, she does give her reply, which is conducted in a more truly argumentative fashion than the defence of Aristophanes. She picks up his points and makes her points against him usually by denying the truth of what he has said. Her supreme defence is, however, the reading of the play “Herakles.”
Aristophanes, touched but not convinced, finally insists that he is Athens’ best friend. He is no Thamuris to be punished for seeing beyond human vision. The last characteristic touch is when Aristophanes catches up the psalterion and sings the lyric of Thamuris. Then he departs, and Balaustion rehearses the last days of Athens, with Euthukles’ part in delaying the tragedy of the doomed city.
By threading one’s way thus through the apology, not from the point of view of Aristophanes’ arguments, but from the point of view of his moods, one experiences a tremendous sense of the personality of the man. Repetitions which are not required for the full presentation of his case take their place as natural to a man who is not only inordinately vain but is immediately swayed by every suggestion and emotion that comes to him. Owing to his volatile temperament the argument is varied by now a bit of vivid description like that of the archon’s feast when Sophocles appeared, now by some merely personal remark to Balaustion.
The criticism in this play, as in that of “Balaustion’s Adventure,” may be considered either as representing some phase of contemporary opinion about Aristophanes or as expressing the opinion of the poet himself. Balaustion’s indignation is especially aroused by the two plays, “The Lusistrata” and the “Thesmophoriazousai,” both of which she finds utterly detestable. It is interesting to compare with this entirely unfavorable criticism the feeling of such distinguished classical scholars as Gilbert Murray and J. A. Symonds. The first Murray describes as a play “full of daring indecency, it is true, but the curious thing is that Aristophanes, while professing to ridicule the women, is all through on their side. The jokes made by the superior sex at the expense of the inferior—to give them their Roman names—are seldom remarkable either for generosity or refinement, and it is our author’s pleasant humor to accuse everybody of every vice he can think of at the moment. Yet with the single exception that he credits women with an inordinate fondness for wine parties—the equivalent it would seem of afternoon tea—he makes them on the whole perceptibly more sensible and more sympathetic than his men.”
Of the second play Symonds speaks with actual enthusiasm. “It has a regular plot—an intrigue and a solution—and its persons are not allegorical but real. Thus it approaches the standard of modern comedy. But the plot, though gigantic in its scale, and prodigious in its wealth of wit and satire, is farcical. The artifices by which Euripides endeavors to win Agathon to undertake his cause, the disguise of Muesilochus in female attire, the oratory of the old man against the women in the midst of their assembly, his detection, the momentary suspension of the dramatic action by his seizure of the supposed baby, his slaughter of the swaddled wine jar, his apprehension by Cleisthenes, the devices and disguises by which Euripides endeavors to extricate his father-in-law from the scrape, and the final ruse by which he eludes the Scythian bowmen, and carries off Muesilochus in triumph—all these form a series of highly diverting comic scenes.” Again, “There is no passage in Aristophanes more amusing than the harangue of Muesilochus. The portrait, too, of Agathon in the act of composition is exquisitely comic. But the crowning sport of the ‘Thesmophoriazousai’ is in the last scene when Muesilochus adapts the Palamedes and the Helen of Euripides to his own forlorn condition, jumbling up the well-known verses of these tragedies with coarse-flavored, rustical remarks; and when at last Euripides, himself, acts Echo and Perseus to the Andromeda of his father-in-law, and both together mystify the policeman by their ludicrous utterance of antiphonal lamentation.”
In her welcome of him, Balaustion expresses rather what she thinks he might be than what she really thinks he is. She welcomes him:
“Good Genius! Glory of the poet, glow
O’ the humorist who castigates his kind,
Suave summer-lightning lambency which plays
On stag-horned tree, misshapen crag askew,
Then vanishes with unvindictive smile
After a moment’s laying black earth bare.
Splendor of wit that springs a thunder ball—
Satire—to burn and purify the world,
True aim, fair purpose: just wit justly strikes
Injustice,—right, as rightly quells the wrong,
Finds out in knaves’, fools’, cowards’, armory
The tricky tinselled place fire flashes through.
No damage else, sagacious of true ore;
Wit learned in the laurel, leaves each wreath
O’er lyric shell or tragic barbiton,—
Though alien gauds be singed,—undesecrate.”
Her attitude here is very like that of criticism in general, except that she is more or less sarcastic, meaning to imply that such Aristophanes might be but is not. Symonds, on the other hand, thinks him really what Balaustion thinks he might be.