Doth some one say that there be gods above?
There are not; no, there are not. Let no fool,
Led by the old false fable, thus deceive you.
Look at the facts themselves, yielding my words
No undue credence; for I say that kings
Kill, rob, break oaths, lay cities waste by fraud,
And doing thus are happier than those
Who live calm pious lives day after day.
How many little states that serve the gods
Are subject to the godless but more strong,
Made slaves by might of a superior army!
CHAPTER XX
THE FUNNY MAN OF REACTION
Needless to say, the Bolshevik sentiments of Euripides were not proclaimed before the altar of Dionysus without protest on the part of the orthodox. There rose up another dramatist, this time a comedian, to champion the ancient and honorable traditions of Athens. Aristophanes was his name, and he was one of the world’s great masters of the comic line. He had infinite verve and wit and imagination; you can read him today and laugh out loud—even while his reactionary ideas make you cross.
The point to be got clear is that right or wrong, this poet is altogether a propagandist; a political campaigner, full of the most bitter fury against his enemies, attacking them by name, lampooning them, ridiculing them, not scrupling even to tell vicious falsehoods about them. He wrote his plays to advocate this thesis or that thesis; he arranged his incidents to exhibit this or that aspect of the thesis; he chose his characters, either to voice his own convictions, or to make the opposite convictions absurd. Not merely do his characters make long speeches in which they set forth the poet’s ideas; at any time in the course of the action the poet will wave these characters one side, and step out in the form of the chorus and say what he thinks, arguing and pleading with the audience, scolding at them, denouncing his enemies, explaining his previous actions, discussing his present play—even going so far as to explain to the audience why they should award the prize to Aristophanes and not to somebody else! I doubt if there has ever been a bolder propagandist using the stage; I doubt if the propertied classes and the partisans of tradition ever had a more vigorous defender; and this, don’t fail to note, in a world dramatist, a “classic” of history’s greatest “art for art’s sake” period!
The amazing modernness of Aristophanes is what strikes us most. There is hardly a single one of our present-day contentious questions he does not discuss at length. He has the malicious wit of the New York “Sun” in the days of Dana; he has the fun of Stephen Leacock, whose comical tales ridicule every new and sensible idea the human mind can conceive. Again, one thinks of the verses of Wallace Irwin—except that Aristophanes sincerely held his convictions, whereas Mr. Irwin’s wit appears to be directed by his newest publisher.
Aristophanes was a gentleman, in the English sense of the word, and wrote for other gentlemen. Just as in England during the late war we observed the manufacturers of beer and munitions rising to power and turning the aristocracy out of their castles, so during the Peloponnesian war Aristophanes saw his cultured class dispossessed by newly rich traders. There is a scene in the “Knights” in which he denounces them; they are “mongers,” a whole succession of “mongers”—topical allusions which the audience received with roars of laughter. First came a rope-monger to govern the state, and then a mutton-monger; now there was a leather-monger—Cleon, ruler of the city, who sat in the audience and heard himself abused. Athens could go only one stage lower, said Aristophanes, and he produced an offal-monger, and recited to this person a list of his vices, which proved him fit to take charge of public affairs.
As to Cleon, the poet objected that his political manners were rude; and in order to set him a good example, described him as “a whale that keeps a public house and has a voice like a pig on fire!” This was in war-time—and imagine what would have happened to a playwright who produced a play in Washington, D. C., in the year 1918, describing the President of the United States in similar language!
Again, Aristophanes produced a play denouncing his city for its shabby treatment of its tributary states. He produced this play while ambassadors from those states were in the audience, attending a council of the empire. For this Cleon had the poet prosecuted and fined; so in his next production Aristophanes comes back, proposing that the people shall kick out a number of rascals, including
All statesmen retrenching the fees and the salaries
Of theatrical bards, in revenge for the railleries,
And jests, and lampoons, of this holy solemnity,
Profanely pursuing their personal enmity,
For having been flouted, and scoff’d, and scorn’d—
All such are admonish’d and heartily warn’d!
Aristophanes loathed Euripides for having turned the ancestral heroes into weak mortals, with sentiments and whinings about their rights and wrongs. He dragged the poet down into hell, and there beat him with all the weapons he could lay hold of. He took the poet’s play of feminism, the “Lysistrata,” and turned it to farce by that most modern of devices, a strike of mothers! A play in which the women of Athens refuse to co-habit with their husbands until the husbands have ended the war with Sparta!