William Lucas Collins

“ 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. ”

“ Cario—quite in the spirit of the clown in a modern pantomime—strips him of his fine clothes, puts the honest man's ragged cloak on him instead, hangs the old shoes round his neck, and kicks him off the stage, howling out that he will surely "lay an information." An old lady who has lost her young lover, as soon as under the new dispensation she lost the charms of her money, in vain appeals to Chremylus, as having influence with this reformed government, to obtain her some measure of justice. Not only the world of men, but the world of gods, is out of joint. ”

“ And now, while Socrates directs the attention of his pupil towards Mount Parnes, from whose heights he sees (and the imagination of the audience is not slow to follow him) the ethereal goddesses descending towards the earth, the Chorus in bodily form enter the orchestra, to the sound of slow music—four-and-twenty nymphs in light cloud-like drapery. They promise, at the request of their great worshipper Socrates, to instruct his pupil in the mysterious science which is to free him from the importunity of his creditors. ”

“ That is no business for women, argues the magistrate. "Why not ?" says Lysistrata; "the wives have long had the management of the private purses of the husbands, to the great advantage of both." In short, the women have made up their minds to have their voice no longer ignored, as hitherto, in questions of peace and war. Their remonstrances have always been met with the taunt that "war is the business of men;" and to any question they have ventured to ask their husbands on such points, the answer has always been the old cry—old as the days of Homer—"Go spin, you jade, go spin!" ”

“ 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." ”

“ It flourished in those glorious days of Athens which not long preceded her political decline,—when the faculties of her citizens were strung to full pitch, when there was much wealth and much leisure, when the arts were highly cultivated and education widely spread, and the refinements and the vices which follow such a state of things presented an ample field for the play of wit and fancy, the badinage of the humorist, or the more trenchant weapons of satire. ”

“ The oracles contain a prophetic history of Athens under its successive demagogues. First there should rise to power a hemp-seller, secondly a cattle-jobber, thirdly a dealer in hides—this Paphlagonian, who now holds rule in Demus's household. But he is to fall before a greater that is to come—one who plies a marvellous trade. Nicias is all impatience to know who and what this saviour of society is to be. Demosthenes, in a mysterious whisper, tells him the coming man is—a Black-pudding-seller! ”

“ Their single slave is to follow behind with other mystic emblems. But a spectacle is nothing, as Dicæopolis feels, without spectators; so he bids his wife go indoors, and mount upon the housetop to see the procession pass. Next to a caricature of their great men, an Athenian audience enjoyed a caricature of their religion. They had this much of excuse, that Paganism was full of tempting themes for burlesque, of which, their comic dramatists liberally availed themselves. But in truth there is a temptation to burlesque and parody presented by all religions, more or less, on their external side. ”

“ Mounted in this strange fashion, to the great alarm of his two daughters, he makes his appearance on the stage, and is raised bodily through the air, with many soothing speeches to the beetle, and a private "aside" to the machinist of the theatre to take great care of him, lest like his predecessor Bellerophon he should fall down and break his leg, and so furnish Euripides with another crippled hero for a tragedy. By some change of scenery he is next represented as having reached the door of Jupiter's palace, where Mercury, as the servant in waiting, comes out to answer his knock. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All the real blessings of mankind come from the hand of Poverty. This Chremylus will by no means admit. It is possible that Wealth may have done some harm heretofore by inadvertence; but if this blessed guest can once recover his sight, then will he for the future visit only the upright and the virtuous; and so will all men—as soon as virtue and honesty become the only introduction to Wealth—be very sure to practise them. Poverty continues to argue the point in the presence of the Chorus of rustic neighbours, who now come on the stage, and naturally take a very warm interest in the question. ”

“ Who so convenient for his purpose as the well-known and remarkable teacher whose grotesque person must have struck every passer-by in the public streets, whose face, with its flat nose, lobster-like eyes, and thick lips, seemed a ready-made comic mask, and whose round and protuberant body made his very friends liken him to the figures of Silenus,—who went about barefooted, unwashed, and in shabby clothes, and would sometimes stand for half an hour in a public thoroughfare as it were wrapt in a dream? ”

“ For one poor instance which his opponent can adduce of virtue being rewarded upon earth, the fluent sophist quotes a dozen against him of those who have made their gain by the opposite qualities. Honesty is not the best policy among mortals; and most assuredly the moral virtues receive no countenance from the example of the gods. Sophistical as the argument is, and utterly unfair as we know it to be if intended to represent the real teaching of Socrates, the satirist seems to have been fully justified in his representation so far as some of the popular lecturers of the day were concerned. ”

“ He was an Athenian by all means—but an Acharnian first.
Such a man is Dicæopolis, the hero of this burlesque. He has been too long cooped up in Athens, while his patrimony is being ruined: and in the first scene he comes up to the Pnyx—the place where the public assembly was held—grumbling at things in general, and the war in particular. The members of the Committee on Public Affairs come, as usual, very late to business—every one, in this city life, is so lazy, as the Acharnian declares: but when business does begin, an incident occurs which interests him very much indeed. ”

“ Why, that I'm Bacchus, Jupiter's own son;
That fellow there's a slave (pointing to Xanthias) .
⁠Æac. (to Xanthias) . Do you hear?
⁠Xan. ⁠I hear him:
A reason the more to give him a good beating;
If he's immortal, he need never mind it."— (F.)
Æacus proceeds to test their divinity, by administering a lash to each of them in turn; but they endure the ordeal so successfully, that at last he gives it up in despair.
"By the Holy Goddess, I'm completely puzzled!
I must take you before Proserpine and Pluto—
Being gods themselves, they're likeliest to know. ”

“ Chremylus appears on the stage accompanied by his slave Cario,—a clever rascal, the earliest classical type which has come down to us of the Davus with whom we become so familiar in Roman comedy, and the Leporello and Scapin, and their numerous progeny of lying valets and sharp servants, impudent but useful, who occupy the modern stage. They have encountered the stranger, and are following him; he is in rags, and he turns out to be blind. With some difficulty, and not without threats of beating, they get him to disclose his name: it is Plutus, the god of wealth himself. ”

“ He appears to the philosopher not so very unpromising a pupil, and the pair retire into the "Thinking-shop," to begin their studies, while the Chorus make their usual address to the audience in the poet's name, touching chiefly upon topics of the day which have lost their interest for us moderns.
But the next act of the comedy brings in Socrates, swearing by all his new divinities that he never met with so utterly hopeless a pupil, in the whole course of his experience, as this very late learner, who has no one qualification for a sophist except his want of honesty. ”

“ A traditionary anecdote of a very different kind, though resting upon not much better authority, has more of probability about it,—that the philosopher himself, having been made aware of what was in store for him, took his place among the audience at the representation, and laughed as heartily as any of them: nay, that he even rose and mounted upon a bench, in order that the strangers in the house to whom his person was previously unknown might see how admirable a counterpart the stage Socrates was of the original. ”

“ And she throws down to her adversary her hood, her basket, and her spindle, and bids him "go home and card wool,"—it is all such old men are fit for; henceforth the proverb (of the men's making) shall be reversed,—"War shall be the care of the women." The magistrate retires, not having got the best of it, very naturally, in an encounter of words; and the Chorus of elders raise the cry—well known as a popular partisan-cry at Athens, and sure to call forth a hearty laugh in such juxtaposition—that the women are designing to "set up a Tyranny!" ”

“ The Black-pudding-man takes courage, and comes to the front; and a duel in the choicest Athenian Billingsgate takes place, in which the current truths or slanders of the day are paraded, no doubt much to the amusement of an Athenian audience—hardly so to the English reader. The new champion shows himself at least the equal of his antagonist in this kind of warfare, and the Chorus are delighted. "There is something hotter, after all, than fire—a more consummate blackguard has been found than Cleon!" ”

“ The Acharnians, therefore, had their national hostility to the Spartans yet more imbittered by their own private sufferings. Yet it was not unnatural that a sober-minded and peaceful yeoman of the district, remembering what his native canton had suffered and was likely to suffer again, should strongly object to the continuance of a war carried on at such a cost. His zeal for the national glory of Athens and his indignation against her enemies might be strong: but the love of home and property is a large component in most men's patriotism. ”

“ At length they agree to a parley, and Peisthetærus begins by paying some ingenious compliments to the high respectability and antiquity of the feathered race. Was not the cock once king of the Persians? is he not still called the "Persian bird"? and still even to this day, the moment he crows, do not all men everywhere jump out of bed and go to their work? And was not the cuckoo king of Egypt; and still when they hear him cry "cuckoo!" do not all the Egyptians go into the harvest-fields? Do not kings bear eagles and doves now on their sceptres, in token of the true sovereignty of the Birds? ”

“ A national comedy which has any pretension at all to literary merit—which is anything more than mere coarse buffoonery—must, in its very nature, be of later growth than epic or lyric poetry, tragedy, or historic narrative. It assumes a fuller intellectual life, a higher civilisation, and a keener taste in the people who demand it and appreciate it. And Athenian comedy, as we have it represented in the plays of Aristophanes, implies all these in a very high degree on the part of the audience to whom it was presented. ”

“ It is now the eighth year of the Peloponnesian War, in which all Greece is ranged on the side of the two great contending powers, Athens and Sparta. The great Pericles—to whose fatal policy, as Aristophanes held, its long continuance has been due—has been six years dead. His place in the commonwealth has been taken by men of inferior mark. And the man who is now most in popular favour, the head of the democratic interest, now completely in the ascendant, is the poet's great enemy, Cleon: an able but unscrupulous man, of low origin, loud and violent, an able speaker and energetic politician. ”

“ A public Informer—that hateful character whom the comic dramatist was never tired of holding up to the execration of his audience—has now found his business fail him, and threatens that, if there be any law or justice left in Athens, this god who leaves the poor knaves to starve shall be made blind again. ”

“ His comedies have a political cast, mainly because at Athens every man was a politician; and no doubt the opinions which he advocates are those which he honestly entertained. But he would probably have been content himself with the reputation of being what he was,—a brilliant and successful writer for the stage; a vigorous satirist, who lashed vice by preference, but had also a jest ready against ungainly virtue; a professional humorist who looked upon most things on their ludicrous side; who desired to be honest and manly in his vocation, and, above all things, not to be dull. ”

“ The men seem well inclined to the new ruling powers, and many apply at once to be furnished with wings. But the state of things in the celestial regions soon gets so intolerable, owing to the stoppage of all communication with earth and its good things, that certain barbarian deities, the gods of Thrace, who are—as an Athenian audience would readily understand—of a very carnal and ill-mannered type, break out into open rebellion, and threaten mutiny against the supremacy of Jupiter, unless he can come to some terms with this new intermediate power. ”

“ And as the younger generation—the modern school of thought—were there the subjects of the caricature, so here the older citizens, who took their seats in court as jurymen day by day, to the neglect of their private affairs and the encouragement of a litigious disposition, appear in their turn in the mirror which the satirist holds up. It is calculated that in the ten courts at Athens, when all were open, there might sometimes be required as many as six thousand jurymen, and there was never any difficulty in obtaining them. ”