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Was born probably about
the year 448 B.C. His first comedy was brought out in 427 B.C. Plato in
his Symposium gives Aristophanes a position at the side of Socrates. The
festivals of Dionysus greatly promoted the production of tragedies,
comedies and satiric dramas. The greater Dionysia were held in the city of
Athens in the month of March, and were connected with the natural feeling
of joy at the approach of summer. These Bacchanalian festivals were scenes
of gross licentiousness, and the coarseness which pervades much of the
work of the great Greek comedian was due to the fact that the popular
taste demanded grossness of allusion on occasions like these. The Athenian
dramatist of the old school was entirely unrestrained. He could satirise
even the Eleusinian mysteries, could deal abundantly in personalities,
burlesque the most sacred subjects, and ridicule the most prominent
persons in the republic. Professor Jebb, in his article on Aristophanes in
the Encyclopedia Britannica, says: “It is neither in the denunciation
nor in the mockery that he is most individual. His truest and highest
faculty is revealed by those wonderful bits of lyric writing in which he
soars above everything that can move to laughter or tears, and makes the
clear air thrill with the notes of a song as free, as musical and as wild
as that of the nightingale invoked by his own chorus in the Birds. The
speech of Dikaios Logos in the Clouds, the praises of country life in
the Peace, the serenade in the Eccleziazusæ, the songs of the Spartan
and Athenian maidens in the Lysistrata; above all, perhaps, the chorus
in the Frogs, the beautiful chant of the Initiated,—these passages, and
such as these, are the true glories of Aristophanes. They are the strains,
not of an artist, but of one who warbles for pure gladness of heart in
some place made bright by the presence of a god. Nothing else in Greek
poetry has quite this wild sweetness of the woods. Of modern poets
Shakespeare alone, perhaps, has it in combination with a like richness and
fertility of fancy.” Fifty-four comedies were ascribed to Aristophanes. We
possess only eleven: these deal with Athenian life during a period of
thirty-six years. The political satires of the poet, therefore, cannot be
understood without a knowledge of Athenian history, and an acquaintance
with its life during the period in which the poet wrote. “Aristophanes was
a natural conservative,” says Professor Jebb; “his ideal was the Athens of
the Persian wars. He detested the vulgarity and the violence of mob-rule;
he clove to the old worship of the gods; he regarded the new ideas of
education as a tissue of imposture and impiety. As a mocker he is
incomparable for the union of subtlety with wit of the comic imagination.
As a poet he is immortal.” The momentous period in the history of Greece
during which Aristophanes began to write, forms the groundwork, 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 homes, 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, about 10,000 of all ranks. 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. The comic drama was to the
Athenians what a free press is to modern commonwealths. 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. The Thesmophoriazusæ is a comedy about the fair sex,
whose whole point—like that also of the comedy of the Frogs—lies in a
satire upon Euripides. Aristophanes never wearied of holding this poet up
to ridicule. Why this was so is not to be discovered: it may have been
that the conservative principles of Aristophanes were offended by some
new-fashioned ideas of his brother poet. The Thesmophoria was a festival
of women only, in honour of Ceres and Proserpine. Euripides was reputed to
be a woman-hater: in one of his tragedies he says,
“O thou most vile! thou—woman!—for what word
That lips could frame, could carry more reproach?”
He can hardly, however, have been a woman-hater who created the beautiful
characters of Iphigenia and Alcestis. In this comedy the Athenian ladies
have resolved to punish Euripides, and the poet is in dismay in
consequence, and takes measures to defend himself. He offers terms of
peace to the offended fair sex, and promises never to abuse them in
future.
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