. . . . . . . . . .
But though you see me dote and dream,
Never think me what I seem;
For my confidential slave
I prefer a pilfering knave;
And when he’s pampered and full-blown,
I snatch him up and dash him down.
. . . . . . . . . .
Hark me—when I seem to doze,
When my wearied eyelids close,
Then they think their tricks are hid;
But beneath the drooping lid
Still I keep a corner left,
Tracing every secret theft:
I shall match them by-and-by,
All the rogues you think so sly.”—(F.)
The two candidates for office now run in from different directions, meeting and nearly upsetting each other, laden with trays of delicacies to tempt the master’s appetite.
“Dem. Well, truly, indeed, I shall be feasted rarely;
My courtiers and admirers will quite spoil me.
Cleon. There, I’m the first, ye see, to bring ye a chair.
B.-P.-S. But a table—here, I’ve brought it first and foremost.
Cleon. See here, this little half-meal cake from Pylos,
Made from the flour of victory and success.
B.-P.-S. But here’s a cake! see here! which the heavenly goddess
Patted and flatted herself, with her ivory hand,
For your own eating.
Dem. Wonderful, mighty goddess!
What an awfully large hand she must have had!”—(F.)
Ragouts, pancakes, fritters, wine, rich cake, hare-pie, are all tendered him in succession. This last is brought by Cleon; but the other cunningly directs his attention to some foreign envoys, whom he declares he sees coming with bags of gold; and while Cleon runs to pounce upon the money, he gets possession of the pie, and presents it as his own offering—“Just as you did the prisoners from Pylos, you know.” Demus eats in turn of all the good things, and grows quite bewildered as to his choice between two such admirable purveyors. He cannot see on which side his best interests lie, and at last appeals helplessly to the audience to advise him. The Black-pudding-man proposes that as a test of the honesty of their service, he should search the lockers of each of them. His own proves to be empty; he has given all he had. But in the Paphlagonian’s are found concealed all manner of good things, especially a huge cake, from which it appears he had cut off but a miserable slice for his master. This decides the question: Cleon is peremptorily desired to surrender his office at once. He makes a last struggle, and a scene ensues which reads like an antedated parody on the last meeting of Macbeth and Macduff. He holds an oracle which forewarns him of the only man who can overthrow his power. Where was his antagonist educated, and how?—“By the cuffs and blows of the scullions in the kitchen.” What did his next master teach him!—“To steal, and then swear he did not.” Cleon’s mind misgives him. What is his trade, and where does he practise it? And when he learns that his rival sells black-puddings at the city gates, he knows that all is over—Birnam Wood is come to Dunsinane. He wildly tears his hair, and takes his farewell in the most approved vein of tragedy.
“O me! the oracles of heaven are sped!
Bear me within, unhappy! O farewell
Mine olive crown! Against my will I leave thee,
A trophy for another’s brow to wear;
Perchance to prove more fortunate than me;
But greater rascal he can never be.”[16]
Here the action of the drama might have ended; but the dramatist had not yet driven his moral home. He had to show what Athens might yet be if she could get rid of the incubus of her demagogues. A choral ode is introduced—quite independent, as is so often the case, of the subject of the comedy—chiefly perhaps, in this case, in order to give opportunity for what we must conclude was a change of scene. The doors in the flat, as we should call it, are thrown open, and disclose to view the citadel of Athens. There, seated on a throne, no longer in his shabby clothes, but in a magnificent robe, and glorious in renewed youth, sits Demus, such as he was in the days of Miltiades and Aristides. His new minister has a secret like Medea’s, and has boiled him young again. “The good old times are come again,” as he declares, thanks to his liberator. There shall be no more ruling by favour and corruption; right shall be might, and he will listen to no more flatterers. To crown the whole, his new minister leads forth Peace—beautiful Peace, in propria persona, hitherto hid away a close prisoner in the house of the Paphlagonian—and presents her to Demus in all her charms. And with this grand tableau the drama closes; it is not difficult to imagine, without being an Athenian, amid what thunders of applause. If the satire had been bitter and trenchant as to the faults and follies of the present—that unfortunate tense of existence, social and political, which appears never to satisfy men in any age of the world—this brilliant reminiscence of the glories of the past, and anticipation of a still more glorious future, was enough to condone for the poet the broadest licence which he had taken. Not indeed that any such apology was required. There was probably not a man among the audience—not a man in the state, except Cleon himself—who would not enjoy the wit far more than he resented its home application. That such a masterpiece was awarded the first prize of comedy by acclamation we should hardly doubt, even if we were not distinctly so informed. Those who know the facile temper of the multitude—and it may be said, perhaps, especially of the Athenian multitude—will understand, almost equally as a matter of course, that the political result was simply nothing. As Mr Mitchell briefly but admirably sums it up—“The piece was applauded in the most enthusiastic manner, the satire on the sovereign multitude was forgiven, and—Cleon remained in as great favour as ever.”[17]
CHAPTER III.
COMEDIES OF THE WAR: THE ACHARNIANS—THE PEACE—LYSISTRATA.
The momentous period in the history of Greece during which Aristophanes began to write, forms the ground-work, more or less, of so many of his Comedies, that it is impossible to understand them, far less to appreciate their point, without some acquaintance with its leading events. All men’s thoughts were occupied by the great contest for supremacy between the rival states of Athens and Sparta, known as the Peloponnesian War. It is not necessary here to enter into details; but the position of the Athenians during the earlier years of the struggle must be briefly described. Their strength lay chiefly in their fleet; in the other arms of war they were confessedly no match for Sparta and her confederate allies. The heavy-armed Spartan infantry, like the black Spanish bands of the fifteenth century, was almost irresistible in the field. Year after year the invaders marched through the Isthmus into Attica, or were landed in strong detachments on different points of the coast, while the powerful Bœotian cavalry swept all the champaign, burning the towns and villages, cutting down the crops, destroying vines and olive-groves,—carrying this work of devastation almost up to the very walls of Athens. For no serious attempt was made to resist these periodical invasions. The strategy of the Athenians was much the same as it had been when the Persian hosts swept down upon them fifty years before. Again they withdrew themselves and all their movable property within the city walls, and allowed the invaders to overrun the country with impunity. Their flocks and herds were removed into the islands on the coasts, where, so long as Athens was mistress of the sea, they would be in comparative safety. It was a heavy demand upon their patriotism; but, as before, they submitted to it, trusting that the trial would be but brief, and nerved to it by the stirring words of their great leader Pericles. The ruinous sacrifice, and even the personal suffering, involved in this forced migration of a rural population into a city wholly inadequate to accommodate them, may easily be imagined, even if it had not been forcibly described by the great historian of those times. Some carried with them the timber framework of their houses, and set it up in such vacant spaces as they could find. Others built for themselves little “chambers on the wall,” or occupied the outer courts of the temples, or were content with booths and tents set up under the Long Walls which connected the city with the harbour of Piræus. Some—if our comic satirist is to be trusted—were even fain to sleep in tubs and hen-coops. Provisions grew dear and scarce. Pestilence broke out in the overcrowded city; and in the second and third years of the war, the Great Plague carried off, out of their comparatively small population, above 10,000 of all ranks. The lands were either left unsown, or sown only to be ravaged before harvest-time by the enemy. No wonder that, as year after year passed, and brought no respite from suffering to the harassed citizens, they began to ask each other how long this was to last, and whether even national honour was worth purchasing at this heavy cost. Even the hard-won victories and the successful blows struck by their admirals at various points on their enemies’ coasts failed to reconcile the less warlike spirits to the continuance of the struggle. Popular orators like Cleon, fiery captains like Alcibiades, still carried the majority with them when they called for new levies and prophesied a triumphant issue; but there was a party at Athens, not so loud but still very audible, who said that such men had personal ambitions of their own to serve, and who had begun to sigh for “peace at any price.”
But it needed a pressure of calamity far greater than the present to keep a good citizen of Athens away from the theatre. If the times were gloomy, so much the more need of a little honest diversion. And if the war party were too strong for him to resist in the public assembly, at least he could have his laugh out against them when caricatured on the stage. It has been already shown that the comic drama was to the Athenians what a free press is to modern commonwealths. As the government of France under Louis XIV. was said to have been “a despotism tempered by epigrams,” so the power of the popular leaders over the democracy of Athens found a wholesome check in the free speech—not to say the licence—accorded to the comedian. Sentiments which it might have been dangerous to express in the public assembly were enunciated in the most plain-spoken language by the actor in the new burlesque. The bolder the attack was, and the harder the hitting, the more the audience were pleased. Nor was it at all necessary, in order to the spectator’s keen enjoyment of the piece, that he should agree with its politics. Many an admirer of the war policy of Lamachus laughed heartily enough, we may be sure, at his presentment on the stage in the caricature of military costume in which the actor dressed the part: just as many a modern Englishman has enjoyed the political caricatures of “H. B.,” or the cartoons in ‘Punch,’ not a whit the less because the satire was pointed against the recognised leaders of his own party. It is probable that Aristophanes was himself earnestly opposed to the continuance of the war, and spoke his own sentiments on this point by the mouth of his characters; but the prevalent disgust at the hardships of this long-continued siege—for such it practically was—would in any case be a tempting subject for the professed writer of burlesques; and the caricature of a leading politician, if cleverly drawn, is always a success for the author. To win the verdict of popular applause, which was the great aim of an Athenian play-writer, he must above all things hit the popular taste.
The Peloponnesian War lasted for twenty-nine years—during most of the time for which our dramatist held possession of the stage. Nearly all his comedies which have come down to us abound, as we should naturally expect, in allusions to the one absorbing interest of the day. But three of them—‘The Acharnians,’ ‘The Peace,’ and ‘Lysistrata,’—are founded entirely on what was the great public question of the day—How long was this grinding war to continue? when should Athens see again the blessings of peace? Treated in various grotesque and amusing forms, one serious and important political moral underlies them all.