This kind of dramatic composition could only flourish in a democratic atmosphere, and it was associated with the democracy in every stage of its development. Occupied from the outset with the preposterous and ridiculous side of life, it castigated all follies, defects, and weaknesses, and amidst the variety and publicity of the civic life of Athens it could never lack either subjects for mirth or a witty, ingenious, and laughter-loving audience ready to catch at every allusion. But it also served the purpose of bringing abuses and contradictions in public life to light. This was the serious side of its calling, for unless inspired by a serious and patriotic temper its humour would have grown dull, ineffective, and contemptible. The aim of the comic poets was to be not mere frivolous provokers of mirth, but teachers of men, and leaders of the people, even as the tragic poets were; and in an age of feverish excitement the severest of their censures were directed against new-fangled ways. Comedy was aristocratic in character, it championed native custom against foreign ways, it ruthlessly denounced every evil tendency in life and art, and every instance of misconduct or abuse of power. It cherished the memory of the heroes of the Wars of Liberation and encouraged others to emulate their example, and it was fond of subjects which had some bearing on important contemporary events, as we see in the Thracian Women of Cratinus, which was associated with the establishment of colonies in Thrace.
The founders of comedy as an Attic art are Crates and Cratinus. Cratinus was slightly younger than Æschylus, and like him was endowed with original creative genius, but his taste for unrestrained freedom and his inexhaustible fund of humour marked him out as a born comic poet, while his rude veracity qualified him to make comedy a power in the state. It became so about the time that Pericles came into power, and though Cratinus was not the sort of man to commit himself unreservedly to one or other of the contesting parties, we know that in his Archilochi (a comedy in which the chorus was composed of scoffers like Archilochus) he brought an Attic citizen upon the stage immediately after the death of Cimon and put in his mouth a lament for “the divine man,” “the most hospitable, the best of all Panhellenes, with whom he had hoped to spend a serene old age—but now he had passed away before him.” The mighty Cratinus was succeeded by Aristophanes and Eupolis, both unmistakably akin to him in mind and feeling, but gentler, more moderate, and stricter in their adherence to the rules of art. But Aristophanes alone combined with these qualities a wealth of creative invention in nothing inferior to the genius of Cratinus.
THE GLORY OF ATHENS
All these men,—philosophers and historians, orators and poets,—each one of whom marks an epoch in the development of art and science, were not merely contemporaries, but lived together in the same city, some born there and nourished from their youth on the glories of their native place, others attracted thither by the same glory; nor was their association merely local, they laboured, consciously or unconsciously, at a common task. For whether they were personally intimate or not with the great statesman who was the centre of the Attic world, nay, even if they were numbered among his opponents, they could not but render him substantial help in his life-work of making Athens the intellectual capital of Greece.
Here whatever germs of culture were introduced from foreign parts gained new life, the Ionian study of countries and peoples became history as soon as Herodotus came into touch with Athens; the Peloponnesian dithyrambus grew into tragedy at Athens, the farce of Megara into Attic comedy; here the philosophy of Ionia and Magna Græcia met to supplement each other’s defects and prepare the way for the development of Attic philosophy; even sophistry was nowhere turned to such account as at Athens. In earlier times every district, city, and island had had its peculiar school and tendencies, but now all vigorous intellectual movements crowded together at Athens; local and tribal peculiarities of temperament and dialect were reconciled; and as the drama (the most Attic of all the arts) absorbed all art-methods into itself, to reproduce them in organic harmony, so from all the achievements of the genius of Greece there grew a general culture which was at once the heritage of Attica and of the Greek nation. Vehemently as other states might oppose the political predominance of Athens, none could deny that the city where Æschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus, Zeno, Anaxagoras, Protagoras, Crates, and Cratinus all laboured together, was the focus of all lofty aspirations, the heart of the nation, Hellas in Hellas.
Herodotus
Slight as is our knowledge of the personal relations of these great contemporaries, there are a few traditions from which we can gather some idea of the intercourse of Pericles with the most eminent among them and of their intercourse with one another. We know that Pericles equipped the chorus for a theatrical performance in which Æschylus carried off the prize. We know of the friendship of Herodotus and Sophocles, and we actually possess the beginning of some occasional verses addressed to Herodotus by the poet, then in the fifty-fifth year of his age; a letter in elegiac metre dating from the time when the historian migrated to Thurii, and withdrew from the delightful society of the best men of Athens. Sophocles was before all things sociable, and we hear that he formed a circle of men skilled in the fine arts and dedicated it to the Muses, and that it held regular meetings. This reciprocal stimulus resulted in a steady advance in all directions. In every branch of art we can trace the epochs of development as surely as in the structure of the trimetre of the drama. But as, generally speaking, Greek art owed its unfaltering progress to the fact that the younger artists did not endeavour to gain a start by rash attempts at originality, but held fast the good in all things and readily adopted and perfected methods that had once gained acceptance, so in Athens we see the elder masters gratefully praised and honoured by their pupils, like Æschylus by Sophocles and Cratinus by Aristophanes.
It is one of the most notable characteristics of the intellectual life of Athens that her eminent men, however high a view they took of their own calling, did not owe their pre-eminence in it to any narrow-minded restriction of their interest to their own peculiar sphere. This versatility was rendered possible by the vitality for which the contemporaries of Pericles were remarkable, and it seems as though the brilliant prime of the Greek nation manifested itself most plainly in the frequent combination of extraordinary mental and physical powers. We cannot but admire the men who retained their vital force unimpaired to extreme old age and advanced in the practice of their art to the last.