The Wasps are driven back, and the old gentleman and his son agree upon a compromise. Bdelycleon promises, on condition that his father will no longer attend the public trials, to establish a little private tribunal for him at home. He shall there take cognisance of all domestic offences; with this great advantage, that if it rains or snows he can hold his courts without being obliged to turn out of doors. And—a point on which the old gentleman makes very particular inquiries—his fee shall be paid him every day as usual. On these terms, with the approval of the Chorus, the domestic truce is concluded.
It seems doubtful, however, whether the household will supply sufficient business for the court. They are thinking of beginning with an unlucky Thracian slave-girl who has burnt a sauce-pan, when most opportunely one of the other slaves rushes on the stage in hot pursuit of the house-dog Labes, who has run off with a piece of Sicilian cheese.[43] The son determines to bring this as the first case before his father, and a mock trial ensues, in which all the appliances and forms of a regular court of justice are absurdly travestied. Another dog appears in the character of prosecutor, and he is allowed to bring the accusation forward through Xanthias, one of the slaves. The indictment is drawn in due form, and the counsel for the prosecution urges in aggravation that the prisoner had refused to give the other dog, his client, a share of it. Philocleon, with a contempt for the ordinary formalities of law which would greatly shock the modern profession, is very much disposed to convict the delinquent Labes at once, on the evidence of his own senses: he stinks of cheese disgustingly, in the very nostrils of the court, at this present moment. But his son recalls him to a sense of the proprieties, and undertakes to be counsel for the defence. He calls as witnesses the cheesegrater, the brazier, and other utensils, to prove that a good deal of the said cheese had been used in the kitchen. He lays stress also on poor Labes’s previous good character as a house-dog; and pleads that, even if he has pilfered in this instance, it is entirely owing to “a defective education.” The whole scene reads very much like a chapter out of one of those modern volumes of clever nursery tales, which are almost too clever for the children for whom they are professedly intended. The Athenian audience did in fact resemble children in many points—only children of the cleverest kind. The advocate winds up with one of those visible appeals ad misericordiam which were common at the Athenian as subsequently at the Roman bar, and which even Cicero did not disdain to make use of—the production of the unhappy family of the prisoner. The puppies are brought into court, and set up such a lamentable yelping that Philocleon desires they may be removed at once.[44] He shows, as his son thinks, some tokens of relenting towards the prisoner. He moves towards the ballot-boxes, and asks which is the one for the condemning votes. The son shows him the wrong one, and into that he drops his vote. He has acquitted the dog by mistake, and faints away when he finds out what he has done—he has never given a vote for acquittal before in his life, and cannot forgive himself. And with this double stroke at the bitter spirit of an Athenian jury and at the ballot-box, the action of the comedy, according to our notions of dramatic fitness, might very properly end.
So strongly does one of the ablest English writers upon Aristophanes, Mr Mitchell, feel this, that in his translation he here divides the comedy, and places the remaining portion in a sequel, to which he gives the title of “The Dicast turned Gentleman.” Philocleon has been persuaded by his son to renounce his old habits of life, and to become more fashionable in his dress and conversation; but the new pursuits to which he betakes himself are scarcely so respectable as his old ones. His son, after a few lessons on modern conversation and deportment, takes him out to a dinner-party, where he insults the guests, beats the servants, and from which he returns in the last scene very far from sober, and not in the best possible company. He is followed by some half-dozen complainants, male and female, whom he has cudgelled in the streets on his way home; and when they threaten to “take the law” of him, he laughs uproariously at the old-fashioned notion. Law-courts, he assures them, are quite obsolete. In vain his son remonstrates with him upon his outrageous proceedings; he bids the “old lawyer,” as he calls him, get out of his way. So that we have here the counterpart to the conclusion of ‘The Clouds:’ as, in the former play, young Pheidippides gives up the turf, at his father’s request, only to become a word-splitting philosopher and an undutiful son; so here the father is weaned from the law-courts, and persuaded to mix in more refined society, only to turn out a “grey iniquity” like Falstaff. The moral, if there be one, is somewhat hard to find. It may possibly be contained in a few words of the Chorus, which speak of the difficulty and the danger of a sudden change in all the habits of a man’s life. Or is it necessary always for the writer of burlesques, any more than for the poet, to supply his audience with any moral at all? Might it not be quite enough to have raised a laugh at the absurd termination of the son’s attempt to reform the father, and the tendency of all new converts to run into extremes?
CHAPTER VI.
THE BIRDS.
‘The Birds’ of Aristophanes, though one of the longest of his comedies, and one which evidently stood high in the estimation of the author himself, has comparatively little interest for a modern reader. Either the burlesque reads to us, as most modern burlesques assuredly would, comparatively poor and spiritless without the important adjuncts of music, scenery, dresses, and what we call the “spectacle” generally, which we know to have been in this instance on the most magnificent scale; or the points in the satire are so entirely Athenian, and directed to the passing topics of the day, that the wit of the allusions is now lost to us. Probably there is also a deeper political meaning under what appears otherwise a mere fantastical trifling; and this is the opinion of some of the best modern critics. It may be, as Süvern thinks, that the great Sicilian expedition, and the ambitious project of Alcibiades for extending the Athenian empire, form the real point of the play; easily enough apprehended by contemporaries, but become obscure to us. This is no place to discuss a question upon which even professed scholars are not agreed; but all these causes may contribute to make us incompetent judges of the effect of the play upon those who saw it acted. It failed, however, to secure the first prize that year: the author was again beaten by Ameipsias—a specimen of whose comedies one would much like to see.
Two citizens of Athens, Peisthetærus and Euelpides—names which we may, perhaps, imperfectly translate into “Plausible” and “Hopeful”—disgusted at the state of things in Athens both politically and socially, have set out in search of some hitherto undiscovered country where there shall be no lawsuits and no informers. They have hired as guides a raven and a jackdaw—who give a good deal of trouble on the road by biting and scratching—and are at last led by them to the palace of the King of the Birds, formerly King Tereus of Thrace, but changed, according to the mythologists, into the Hoopoe, whose magnificent crest is a very fit emblem of his royalty. His wife is Procne—“the Nightingale”—daughter of a mythical king of Attica, so that, in fact, he may be considered as a national kinsman. The royal porter, the Trochilus, is not very willing to admit the visitors, looking upon them as no better than a couple of bird-catchers; but the Bird-king himself receives them, when informed of their errand, with great courtesy, though he does not see how he can help them. But can they possibly want a finer city than Athens? No—but some place more quiet and comfortable. But why, he asks, should they apply to him?
“Because you were a man, the same as us;
And found yourself in debt, the same as us;
And did not like to pay, the same as us;
And after that you changed into a bird,
And ever since have flown and wandered far
Over the land and seas, and have acquired
All knowledge that a bird or man can learn.”—(F.)
The adventurers do not learn much, however, from the Hoopoe. But an original idea strikes Peisthetærus—why not build a city up here, in the region of the Birds, the mid atmosphere between earth and heaven? If the Hoopoe and his subjects will but follow his advice, they will thus hold the balance of power in the universe.
“From that position you’ll command mankind,
And keep them in utter thorough subjugation,—
Just as you do the grasshoppers and locusts;
And if the gods offend you, you’ll blockade them,
And starve them to surrender.”—(F.)
The king summons a public meeting of his subjects to consider the proposal of their human visitors; and no doubt the appearance of the Chorus in their grotesque masks and elaborate costumes, representing twenty-four birds of various species, from the flamingo to the woodpecker, would be hailed with great delight by an Athenian audience, who in these matters were very much like grown-up children. The music appears to have been of a very original character, and more elaborate than usual; and the part of the Nightingale, with solos on the flute behind the scenes, is said to have been taken by a female performer of great ability, a public favourite who had just returned to Athens after a long absence. But the mere words of a comic extravaganza, whether Greek or English, without the accompaniments, on which so much depends, are little better than the dry skeleton of the piece, and can convey but a very inadequate idea of its attractions when fittingly “mounted” on the stage. This is notably the case with this production of our author, which, from its whole character, must have depended very much upon the completeness of such accessories for its success.