III. Third Period.[4] (10) 393 B.C.[4] The Ecclesiazusae (women in parliament).—The women, disguised as men, steal into the ecclesia, and succeed in decreeing a new constitution. At this time the demagogue Agyrrhius led the assembly; and the play is, in fact, a satire on the general demoralization of public life.
(11) 388 B.C. The Plutus (Wealth).—The first edition of the play had appeared in 408 B.C., being a symbolical representation of the fact that the victories won by Alcibiades in the Hellespont had brought back the god of wealth to the treasure-chamber of the Parthenon. In its extant form the Plutus is simply a moral allegory. Chremylus, a worthy but poor man, falls in with a blind and aged wanderer, who proves to be the god of wealth. Asclepius restores eyesight to Plutus; whereupon all the just are made rich and all the unjust are reduced to poverty.
Among the lost plays, the following are the chief of which anything is known:—
1. The Banqueters Δαιταλεῖς, 427 B.C.—A satire on young Athens. A father has two sons; one is brought up in the good old school, another in the tricky subtleties of the new; and the contrast of results is the chief theme.
2. The Babylonians, 426 B.C.—Under this name the subject-allies of Athens are represented as “Babylonians”-barbarian slaves, employed to grind in the mill. The oppression of the allies by the demagogues—a topic often touched elsewhere—was, then, the main subject of the piece, in which Aristophanes is said to have attacked especially the system of appointing to offices by lot. The comedy is memorable as opening that Aristophanic war upon Cleon which was continued in the Knights and the Wasps.
The Merchantmen, The Farmers, The Preliminary Contest (Proagon), and possibly the Old Age (Geras), belonged to the First Period. The Geras is assigned by Süvern to 422 B.C., and is supposed to have been a picture of dotage similar to that in the Knights. A comedy called The Islands is conjectured to have dealt with the sufferings imposed by the war on the insular tributaries. The Triphales was probably a satire on Alcibiades; the Storks, on the tragic poet Patrocles.
In the Aeolosicon—produced by his son Araros in 387 B.C.—Aristophanes probably parodied the Aeolus of Euripides. The Cocalus is thought to have been a parody of the legend, according to which a Sicilian king of that name slew Minos.
A sympathetic reader of Aristophanes can hardly fail to perceive that, while his political and intellectual tendencies are well marked, his opinions, in so far as they colour his comedies, are too indefinite to reward, or indeed to tolerate, analysis. Aristophanes was a natural conservative. His ideal was the Athens of the Persian wars. He disapproved the policy which had made Athenian empire irksome to the allies and formidable to Greece; he detested the vulgarity and the violence of mob-rule; he clave to the old worship of the gods; he regarded the new ideas of education as a tissue of imposture and impiety. How far he was from clearness or precision of view in regard to the intellectual revolution which was going forward, appears from the Clouds, in which thinkers and literary workers who had absolutely nothing in common are treated with sweeping ridicule as prophets of a common heresy. Aristophanes is one of the men for whom opinion is mainly a matter of feeling, not of reason. His imaginative susceptibility gave him a warm and loyal love for the traditional glories of Athens, however dim the past to which they belonged; a horror of what was ugly or ignoble in the present; a keen perception of what was offensive or absurd in pretension. The broad preferences and dislikes thus generated were enough not only to point the moral of comedy, but to make him, in many cases, a really useful censor for the city. The service which he could render in this way was, however, only negative. He could hardly be, in any positive sense, a political or a moral teacher for Athens. His rooted antipathy to intellectual progress, while it affords easy and wide scope for his wit, must after all, lower his intellectual rank. The great minds are not the enemies of ideas. But as a mocker—to use the word which seems most closely to describe him on this side—he is incomparable for the union of subtlety with riot of the comic imagination. As a poet, he is immortal. And, among Athenian poets, he has it for his distinctive characteristic that he is inspired less by that Greek genius which never allows fancy to escape from the control of defining, though spiritualizing, reason, than by such ethereal rapture of the unfettered fancy as lifts Shakespeare or Shelley above it,—
| “Pouring his full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.” |
Bibliography.—Editio princeps (Aldine, Venice, 1498), by Marcus Musurus (not including the Lysistrata and Thesmophoriazusae); S. Bergler (ed. P. Burmann, 1760); Invernizi-Beck-Dindorf (1794-1834); I. Bekker (1829); H.A. Holden (expurgated text, 1868), with Onomasticon (new ed., 1902); F.H.M. Blaydes (1880-1893), and critical edition (1886); J. van Leeuwen (1893 foll.); F.W. Hall and E.M. Geldart (text, 1900-1901), with the fragment (from the Oxyrhynchus papyri) of a dialogue between two women concerning a leathern phallus, perhaps from Aristophanes. There is a complete edition of the valuable scholia by F. Dübner (1842, Didot series),—with the anonymous biographies of the poet; of the Ravenna MS. by A. Martin (1883), and W.G. Rutherford (1896-1905). Among English translations mention may be made of those of V.J. Hickie (prose, in Bohn’s Classical Library); (verse) J. Hookham Frere, five plays; T. Mitchell, four plays; and, above all, B.B. Rogers, a brilliant work of exceptional merit. There is a concordance to the plays and fragments by H. Dunbar (1883). On Aristophanes generally see H. Müller-Strübing, Aristophanes und die historische Kritik (1873); the article by G. Kaibel in Pauly-Wissowa’s Realencyclopadie, ii. 1 (1896); A. Couat, Aristophane et l’ancienne comédie attique (1889); E. Deschanel, Études sur Aristophane (3rd ed., 1892); G. Dantu, Opinions et critiques d’Aristophane sur le mouvement politique et intellectuel à Athènes (Paris, 1907). For the numerous editions and translations of separate plays in English and other languages see the introductions to Blaydes’s edition, and, for the literature, the introduction to W.J.M. Starkie’s edition of the Wasps (1897); W. Engelmann, Scriptores Graeci (1880); and “Bericht über die Literatur der griechischen Komödie aus den Jahren 1892-1901” in C. Bursian’s Jahresbericht über die Fortschritte der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, cxvi. (1904).