But poor Lysistrata soon has her troubles. Her unworthy recruits are fast deserting her. They are going off to their husbands in the most sneaking manner—creeping out through the little hole under the citadel which led to the celebrated cave of Pan, and letting themselves down from the walls by ropes at the risk of breaking their necks. Those who are caught all have excellent excuses. One has some fleeces of fine Milesian wool at home which must be seen to,—she is sure the moths are eating them. Another has urgent occasion for the doctor; a third cannot sleep alone for fear of the owls—of which, as every one knows, there were really a great many at Athens. The husbands, too, are getting uncomfortable without their housekeepers; there is no one to cook their victuals; and one poor soul comes and humbly entreats his wife at least to come home to wash and dress the baby.
It is becoming plain that either the war or the wives’ resolution will soon give way, when there arrives an embassy from Sparta. They cannot stand this general strike of the wives. They are agreed already with their enemies the Athenians on one point—as to the women—that the old Greek comedian’s[26] proverb, which we have borrowed and translated freely, is true,—
There is no living with ’em—or without ’em.
They are come to offer terms of peace. When two parties are already of one mind, as Lysistrata observes, they are not long in coming to an understanding. A treaty is made on the spot, with remarkably few preliminaries. The Spartan ambassadors are carried off at once to an entertainment in the Acropolis under the presidency of Lysistrata; and the Athenians find, as is so often the case when those who have been the bitterest opponents become better acquainted, that the Spartans are excellent fellows in their cups—nay, positively entertaining, as one of the plenipotentiaries who returns from the banquet declares; which last would be quite a new characteristic, to the ears of an Athenian audience, of their slow and steady neighbours. So charmed are the Chorus with the effect of a little wholesome conviviality upon national temper, that they deliver it as their decided opinion that in future all embassies to foreign states should be fairly drunk before they set out. When men are sober, they are critical and suspicious, and put a wrong interpretation on things, and stand upon their dignity; but under the genial influence of good liquor there is a disposition to make everything pleasant. And so, with two choric hymns, chanted by Spartans and Athenians in turn—so bright and graceful that they would seem out of place in such wild company, but that we know the poet meant them to herald the joy with which a real Peace would be welcomed—this broad extravaganza ends.
For the humour is indeed of the broadest, in some passages, even for Aristophanes. But in spite of coarse language, it has been justly said by modern critics in the poet’s defence, that the moral of the piece is honest and true. The longing for that domestic happiness which has been interrupted and shattered by twenty years of incessant war, is a far more wholesome sentiment, in its nature and effects, than very much of modern sentiment which passes under finer names.
CHAPTER IV.
THE CLOUDS.
The satire in this, one of the best-known of Aristophanes’s comedies, is directed against the new schools of philosophy which had been lately developed in Athens, and which reckoned among their disciples not only the more intellectual of the rising generation, but also a good many idle young men of the richer classes, who were attracted by the novelty of the tenets which were there propounded, the eloquence of the teachers, and the richness of illustration and brilliant repartee which were remarkable features in their method. There were several reasons which would make this new learning unpopular, whatever its real merits might have been. These men controverted popular opinions, and assumed to know more than other people—which was an offence to the dignity of the great Athenian commons. The lecturers themselves were nearly all of them foreigners—Thrasymachus from Chalcedon, Gorgias from Leontini in Sicily, Protagoras from Abdera in Thrace. These, with many others of less note, had brought their talents to Athens as the great intellectual mart, where such ware was understood, and was sure to find its price, both in renown and in the grosser and more literal sense. Besides, they sneered (so it was said) at the national religion; and the national religion, especially to the lower ranks of citizens, meant holidays, and public feasts, and processions, and a good deal of licence and privilege which was very much valued. There were reasons, too, why the poet himself should be very willing to exercise his wit at the expense of the philosophers: to his conservative mind these outlandish teachers, with their wild speculations and doctrine of free thought, and generally aggressive attitude towards the established order of things, were especially objectionable.
The term “Sophist,” though in its original and wider sense it was applied to the professors of philosophy generally, had come to mean, in the popular language of Athens, those who, for pay, undertook to teach a method of rhetoric and argument by which a man might prove anything whatever. It is against these public lecturers, who either taught or were commonly believed to teach this perversion of the great science of dialectics, that Aristophanes brings the whole weight of his biting humour to bear in ‘The Clouds.’ This is no place to inquire how far the accusation brought against them was or was not a fair one, or whether that abuse of their powers which was the disgrace of a few may not have been attributed by unjust clamour to a whole class of public teachers in which they were but the exceptions. It is possible to believe not only, with Mr Grote, that the Sophists “bear the penalty of their name in its modern sense,” but also that in their own day they bore the penalty of superior ability and intelligence in becoming the objects of dislike, and therefore of misrepresentation, and yet to understand how they may have afforded very fair material for the professional satirist. The art of public speaking, which these professors taught, is a powerful engine, which in unscrupulous hands may do as much to mislead as to instruct. That the love of disputation and the consciousness of power will tempt a clever man to maintain a paradox, and discomfit an opponent by what he knows to be a fallacy—that a keen intellect will delight in questioning an established belief—and that the shallow self-sufficiency of younger disciples will push any doctrine to its wildest extremes,—are moral facts for whose confirmation we have no need to go to ancient history. And we are not to suppose that either the poet or his audience intended the fun of the piece to be taken as serious evidence either of the opinions or the practice of any school whatever.
But the question which has, with much more reason, exercised the ingenuity of able critics, is the choice which Aristophanes has made of Socrates as the representative of this sophistical philosophy, and his motive in holding him up to ridicule, as he here does, by name. For Socrates, it is generally allowed, was the opponent of these Sophists, or at least of those objectionable doctrines which they were said to teach. But there were some very important points—and those such as would come most under public observation—in which he, as a philosophical teacher, bore a broad resemblance to them. The whole character of this new intellectual movement in Greece was negative and critical, professing to aim rather at detecting error than establishing certainty. To this the method of Socrates formed no exception. His favourite assertion, that he himself knew nothing for certain, expressed this in the strongest form. And if the reproach brought against the Sophists was that they loved argument too much for argument’s sake, and thought more of confounding an opponent than of demonstrating a truth, we have only to read some of the dialogues in which Socrates bears a part, as we have them recorded by his friends and pupils, to see that he at least supplied abundant ground to an ordinary hearer to say the same of him. He could scarcely have realised to the public of his own day the definition which Schiller gives of the true philosopher—“One who loves truth better than his system.” Xenophon tells us that in argument he did what he liked with his opponents; and Plato has compared him to the mythical giant Antæus, who insisted that every stranger whom he met should try a fall with him.
It is of the very essence, again, of caricature to take gravity and wisdom for its subject. And caricature on the Athenian stage knew no limits in this. Nothing was sacred for the comic dramatist and his Chorus. The national gods, the great religious mysteries, the mighty Athenian people itself, were all made to put on the comic mask, and figure in the wild procession. Why should the philosophers escape? The higher the ground upon which Socrates stood, the more tempting mark did he present. Lucian understood perfectly the kind of taste to which a writer of comedy must appeal at Athens, when, in his own defence for having made sport of the philosophers, he says: “For such is the temper of the multitude, they delight in listening to banter and abuse, especially when what is solemn and dignified is made the subject of it.”[27]