THE PEACE.

“Eur.Fellow, you’ll plunder me a whole tragedy!Take it, and go.Dic.Yes; I forsooth, I’m going.But how shall I contrive? There’s something moreThat makes or mars my fortune utterly;Yet give them, and bid me go, my dear Euripides;A little bundle of leaves to line my basket.Eur.For mercy’s sake!... But take them.—There they go!My tragedies and all! ruined and robbed!Dic.No more; I mean to trouble you no more.Yes, I retire; in truth I feel myselfImportunate, intruding on the presenceOf chiefs and princes, odious and unwelcome.But out, alas! that I should so forgetThe very point on which my fortune turns;I wish I may be hanged, my dear Euripides,If ever I trouble you for anything,Except one little, little, little boon,—A single lettuce from your mother’s stall.”—(F.)

This parting shot at the tragedian’s family antecedents(for his mother was said to have been a herb-woman) is quite in the style of Athenian wit, which was nothing if not personal. Euripides very naturally orders the door to be shut in the face of this uncivil intruder,—who has got all he wanted, however. Clad in the appropriate costume, he lays his head on the chopping-block, while one of the Chorus stands over him with an axe; and in this ludicrous position makes one of those addresses to the audience which were usual in these comedies, in which the poet assumes for the moment his own character, and takes the house into his personal confidence. As he has already told Euripides,—

“For I must wear a beggar’s garb to-day,Yet be myself in spite of my disguise,That the audience all may know me.”

He will venture upon a little plain-speaking to his fellow-Athenians, upon a very delicate subject, as he is well aware. But at this January festival, unlike the greater one in March, no foreigners were likely to be present, so that all that was said might be considered as between friends.

“The words I speak are bold, but just and true.Cleon, at least, cannot accuse me now,That I defame the city before strangers.For this is the Lenæan festival,And here we meet, all by ourselves alone;No deputies are arrived as yet with tribute,No strangers or allies; but here we sit,A chosen sample, clean as sifted corn,With our own denizens as a kind of chaff.First, I detest the Spartans most extremely;And wish that Neptune, the Tænarian deity,Would bury them and their houses with his earthquakes.For I’ve had losses—losses, let me tell ye,Like other people: vines cut down and ruined.But, among friends (for only friends are here),Why should we blame the Spartans for all this?For people of ours, some people of our own,—Some people from amongst us here, I mean;But not ThePeople—pray remember that—I never said ThePeople—but a packOf paltry people, mere pretended citizens,Base counterfeits, went laying informations,And making confiscation of the jerkinsImported here from Megara; pigs, moreover,Pumpkins, and pecks of salt, and ropes of onions,Were voted to be merchandise from Megara,Denounced, and seized, and sold upon the spot.”—(F.)

He goes on to mention other aggressions on the part of his own countrymen—to wit, the carrying off from Megara a young woman, no great loss to any community in point of personal character, but still a Megarian—aggressions not of much importance in themselves, but such as he feels sure no high-spirited nation could be expected to put up with:—

“Just make it your own case; suppose the SpartansHad manned a boat, and landed on your islands,And stolen a pug puppy-dog from Seriphos”—

why, as he says, the whole nation would have flown to arms at once to avenge the insult.

At this point he is interrupted. One party of the Acharnians are for making short work with such a blasphemer. But the other Semi-chorus vow that he says nothing but the truth, and dare them to lay handsupon him. A struggle ensues, and the war faction call aloud for Lamachus—the “Great Captain” of the day. And that general, being ready within call (as every one is who is required for stage purposes), makes his appearance in grand military costume, with an enormous crest towering over his helmet, and a gorgon’s head of gigantic dimensions upon his shield. He speaks in heroics, as befits him:—

“Whence falls that sound of battle on mine ear?Who needs my help? for Lamachus is here!Whose summons bids me to the field repair,And wakes my slumbering gorgon from her lair?”

Dicæopolis is paralysed at the terrible vision, and humbly begs pardon of the hero for what he has said. Lamachus bids him repeat his words:—

“Dic.I—I can’t remember—I’m so terrified.The terror of that crest quite turned me dizzy:Do take the hobgoblin away from me, I beseech you.[21]Lam.(takes off his helmet.) There then.Dic.Now turn it upside down.Lam.See, there.Dic.Now give me one of the feathers.”—(F.)

And, to the general’s great disgust, he pretends to use it to tickle his throat. He is so terribly frightened hemustbe sick. Lamachus draws his sword, and makes at the scoffer; but in the tussle the general (to the great amusement, no doubt, of the audience) gets the worst of it. He indignantly demands to know who this vulgar fellow is, who has no respect for dignities:—

“Dic.I’ll tell ye—an honest man; that’s what I am.A citizen that has served his time in the army,As a foot-soldier, fairly; not like you,Pilfering and drawing pay with a pack of foreigners.”—(F.)

He appeals to his audience—did any of them ever get sent out as High Commissioners, with large salaries, like Lamachus? Not one of them. The whole administration of the Athenian war office is nothing but rank jobbery. The general, finding the argument taking a rather personal and unpleasant turn, goes off, with loud threats of what he will do to the Spartans; and Dicæopolis, assuming his own acquittal by the Acharnians, proclaims, on the strength of his private treaty of peace, a free and open market on his farm for Megarians and Thebans, and all the Peloponnesian Greeks.

An interval between what we should call the acts of the play is filled up by a “Parabasis” as it was termed—a chant in which the Chorus pleads the author’s cause with the audience. By his comedy of ‘The Babylonians,’ produced the year before, he had drawn upon him, as has been already said, the wrath of Cleon and his party, and they had even gone so far as to bring an indictment against him for treason against the state. And he now, by the mouth of the Chorus,makes a kind of half-apology for his former boldness, and assures the spectators that he has never been really disloyal to Athens. As to Cleon the tanner—he will “cut him into shoe-soles for the Knights;” and we have already seen how he kept his word.

When the regular action of the comedy is resumed, Dicæopolis has opened his free market. The first who comes to take advantage of it is an unfortunate Megarian, who has been reduced to poverty by the war. His native district, lying midway between the two powerful neighbours, had in its perplexity taken what they thought the strongest side, had put an Athenian garrison to the sword, and had suffered terribly from the vengeance of the Athenians in consequence. They had been excluded, on pain of death, from all ports and markets within the Athenian rule, and twice in every year orders were given to march into their territory and destroy their crops. The misery to which the wretched inhabitants were thus reduced is described with a grim humour. The Megarian, having nothing else left to dispose of, has brought his two little daughters to market for sale.

“Meg.Ah, there’s the Athenian market! heaven bless it,I say; the welcomest sight to a Megarian.I’ve looked for it, and longed for it, like a childFor its own mother. You, my daughters dear,Disastrous offspring of a dismal sire,List to my words, and let them sink impressedUpon your empty stomachs; now’s the timeThat you must seek a livelihood for yourselves,Therefore resolve at once, and answer me;Will you be sold abroad, or starve at home?Daughters(both together). Let us be sold, papa! Let us be sold!Meg.I say so too; but who do ye think will purchaseSuch useless, mischievous commodities?However, I have a notion of my own,A true Megarian scheme; I mean to sell yeDisguised as pigs, with artificial pettitoes.Here, take them, and put them on. Remember now,Show yourselves off; do credit to your breeding,Like decent pigs; or else, by Mercury,If I’m obliged to take you back to Megara,There you shall starve, far worse than heretofore.This pair of masks too—fasten ’em on your faces,And crawl into the sack there on the ground.Mind ye, remember—you must squeak and whine.”—(F.)

After some jokes upon the subject, not over-refined, Dicæopolis becomes the purchaser of the pair for a peck of salt and a rope of onions. He is sending the Megarian home rejoicing, and wishing that he could make as good a bargain for his wife and his mother as well, when that curse of the Athenian commonwealth, an informer, comes upon the scene. He at once denounces the pigs as contraband; but Dicæopolis calls the constables to remove him—he will have no informers in his market. The next visitor is a Theban, a hearty, good-humoured yeoman, but who disgusts Dicæopolis by bringing with him two or three pipers, whom the master of the market bids hold their noise and be off; Bœotian music, we are to understand, being always excruciating to the fine Athenian ear. The new-comer has brought with him, to barter for Athenian produce, fish, wild-fowl, and game of all kinds, including grasshoppers, hedgehogs, weasels, and—writing-tables. But what attracts the attention of Dicæopolis most is some splendid Copaic eels.[22]He has not seen their sweet faces, he vows, for six years or more—never since this cursed war began. He selects the finest, and calls at once for brazier and bellows to cook it. The Bœotian naturally asks to be paid for this pick of his basket; but Dicæopolis explains to him that he takes it by the landlord’s right, as “market-toll.” For the rest of the lot, however, he shall have payment in Athenian wares. “What will he take?—sprats? crockery?” Nay, they have plenty of these things at home, says the Theban; he would prefer some sort of article that is plentiful in Attica and scarce at Thebes. A bright idea strikes Dicæopolis at once:—

“Dic.Ah! now I have it! take an Informer home with ye—Pack him like crockery—and tie him fast.Bœot.By the Twin Gods, I will! I’ll make a show of himFor a tricksy ape. ’Twill pay me well, I warrant.”

Apropos to the notion, an informer makes his appearance, and Dicæopolis stealthily points him out to the Bœotian. “He’s small,” remarks the latter, in depreciation. “Yes,” replies the Athenian; “but every inch of him is thoroughly bad.” As the man, intent on hisvocation, is investigating the stranger’s goods, and calling witnesses to this breach of the law, Dicæopolis gives the signal, and in a trice he is seized, tied up with ropes and straw like a large jar, and after a few hearty kicks—administered to him just to see whether he rings sound or not—this choice specimen of Athenian produce is hoisted on the shoulders of a slave, and carried off as a curiosity to Thebes.

The concluding scene brings out in strong contrast the delights of peace and the miseries of war. General Lamachus has heard of the new market, and cannot resist the temptation to taste once more some of its now contraband luxuries. He sends a slave to buy for him a three-shilling eel. But no eel shall the man of war get from Dicæopolis—no, not if he would give his gorgon-faced shield for it; and the messenger has to return to his master empty. A farmer who has lost his oxen in one of the raids made by the enemy, and has heard of the private supply of Peace which is in the possession of Dicæopolis, comes to buy a small measure of it for himself, even if not of the strongest quality—the “five-years’ sort” would do. But he asks in vain. Next arrives a messenger from a newly-married bridegroom, who has a natural dislike under the circumstances to go on military service. Would Dicæopolis oblige him with a little of this blessed balsam, so that he may stay at home this one campaign?

“Dic.Take it away;I would not part with a particle of my balsamFor all the world; not for a thousand drachmas.But that young woman there—who’s she?

Mess.The bridesmaid,With a particular message from the bride,Wishing to speak a word in private with you.Dic.Well, what have ye got to say? let’s hear it all.Come—step this way—no, nearer—in a whisper—Nearer, I say—Come then, now, tell me about it.(After listening with comic attention to asupposed whisper.)O, bless me! what a capital, comical,Extraordinary string of female reasonsFor keeping a young bridegroom safe at home!Well, we’ll indulge her, since she’s only a woman;She’s not obliged to serve; bring out the balsam!Come, where’s your little vial?”—(F.)

While Dicæopolis is continuing his culinary preparations for the banquet which is to close the festival—preparations in which the old gentlemen of the Chorus, in spite of their objections to the truce, take a very lively interest—a messenger comes in hot haste to summon Lamachus. The Bœotians are meditating an attack on the frontier, hoping to take the Athenians at disadvantage at this time of national holiday. It is snowing hard; but the orders of the commanders-in-chief are imperative, and Lamachus must go to the front. And at this moment comes another messenger to call Dicæopolis to the banquet, which stays only for him. A long antithetic dialogue follows, pleasant, it must be supposed, to Athenian ears, who delighted in such word-fencing, tiresome to English readers. Lamachus orders out his knapsack; Dicæopolis bids his slave bring his dinner-service. The general, cursing all commanders-in-chief, calls for his plume; the Acharnian for roast pigeons. Lamachus calls for his spear;Dicæopolis for the meat-spit. The hero whirls his gorgon shield round; the other mimics the performance with a large cheese-cake. Losing patience at last, partly through envy of such good fare, and partly at the mocking tone of the other, Lamachus threatens him with his weapon; Dicæopolis defends himself with the spit, like Bailie Nicol Jarvie with his hot poker; and so, after this passage of broad farce, the scene closes—the general shouldering his knapsack and marching off into the snow-storm, while the other packs up his contribution to the public supper, at which he hastens to take his place.

A brief interval, filled by a choral ode, allows time enough in dramatic imagination for Lamachus’s expedition and for Dicæopolis’s feast. A messenger from the army rushes in hot haste upon the stage, and knocks loudly at the door of the former. “Hot-water, lint, plaister, splints!” The general has been wounded. In leaping a ditch he has sprained his ankle and broken his head; and here he comes. As the discomfited warrior limps in on the one side, groaning and complaining, Dicæopolis, with a train of joyous revellers, enters on the other. He does not spare his jests and mockeries upon the other’s miserable condition; and the piece closes with a tableau sufficiently suggestive of the advantages of peace over war—the general, supported by his attendants, having his wounds dressed, and roaring with pain, occupying one side of the stage; while the Acharnian revellers, crowned with garlands, shout their joyous drinking-songs to Bacchus on the other.

‘The Peace’ was brought out four years after ‘The Acharnians,’ when the war had already lasted ten years. This was not long before the conclusion of that treaty between the two great contending powers which men hoped was to hold good for fifty years, known as the Peace of Nicias. The leading idea of the plot is the same as in the previous comedy; the intense longing, on the part of the more domestic and less ambitious citizens, for relief from the prolonged miseries of the war.

Trygæus,—whose name suggests the lost merriment of the vintage,—finding no help in men, has resolved to undertake an expedition in his own person, to heaven, to expostulate with Jupiter for allowing this wretched state of things to go on. With this object in view (after some previous attempts with a ladder, which, owing to the want of anything like apoint d’appui, have naturally resulted in some awkward falls), he has fed and trained a dung-beetle, which is to carry him up to the Olympian throne; there being an ancient fable to the effect that the creature had once upon a time made his way there in pursuit of his enemy the eagle.[23]It is a burlesqueupon the aerial journey of Bellerophon on Pegasus, as represented in one of the popular tragedies of Euripides; and Trygæus addresses his strange steed as his “little Pegasus” accordingly. 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.

Mercury(looks round and sniffs). What’s this I smell—a mortal? (Sees Trygæus on his beetle.) O, great Hercules!What horrible beast is this?Tryg.A beetle-horse.Merc.O you abominable, impudent, shameless beast!You cursed, cursed, thrice accursed sinner!How came you up here? what business have you here?O you abomination of abominations,Speak—what’s your name? D’ye hear?Tryg.Abomination.Merc.What place d’ye come from?Tryg.From Abomination.Merc.(rather puzzled). Eh?—what’s your father’s name?Tryg.Abomination.Merc.(in a fury). Look here now,—by the Earth, you die this minute,Unless you tell me your accursed name.Tryg.Well—I’m Trygæus of Athmon; I can pruneA vine with any man—that’s all. I’m no informer,I do assure you; I hate law like poison.Merc.And what have you come here for?Tryg.(pulling something out of a bag). Well, you see,I’ve brought you this beefsteak.Merc.(softening his tone considerably). Oh, well—poor fellow!But how did you come?Tryg.Aha, my cunning friend!I’m not such an abomination, after all!But come, call Jupiter for me, if you please.Merc.Ha, ha! you can’t see him, nor any of the gods;They’re all of them gone from home—went yesterday.Tryg.Why, where on earth are they gone to?Merc.Earth, indeed!Tryg.Well, then, but where?Merc.They’re gone a long way offInto the furthest corner of the heavens.Tryg.And why are you left here, pray, by yourself?Merc.Oh, I’m taking care of the pots and pans, and suchlike.Tryg.What made them all leave home so suddenly?Merc.Disgusted with you Greeks. They’ve given you upTo War, to do exactly what he likes with:They’ve left him here to manage all their business,And gone themselves as far aloft as possible,That they may no more see you cutting throats,And may be no more bothered with your prayers.Tryg.What makes them treat us in this fashion—tell me?Merc.Because you would have war, when they so oftenOffered you peace. Whenever those fools the SpartansMet with some small success, then it was always—“By the Twin Gods, Athens shall catch it now!”And then, when you Athenians got the best of it,And Sparta sent proposals for a peace,You would say always—“Oh, they’re cheating us!We won’t be taken in—not we, by Pallas!No, by great Jupiter! they’ll come againWith better terms, if we keep hold of Pylos.”Tryg.That is uncommonly like what wedidsay.

No doubt it was: Aristophanes is writing history here with quite as much accuracy as most historians. Mercury goes on to explain to his visitor that the Greeks are never likely to see Peace again: War has cast her into a deep pit (which he points out), and heaped great stones upon her: and he has now got an enormous mortar, in which he proposes to pound all the cities of Greece, if he can only find a pestle big enough for his purpose. “But hark!” says Mercury—“I do believe he’s coming out! I must be off.” And while the god escapes, and Trygæus hides himself in affright from the terrible presence, War, a grim giant in full panoply, and wearing, no doubt, the most truculent-looking mask which the theatrical artist could furnish, comes upon the scene, followed by his man Tumult, who lugs a huge mortar with him. Into this vessel War proceeds to throw various ingredients, which represent the several towns and states which were the principal sufferers in the late campaigns: leeks for Prasiæ, garlic for Megara, cheese for Sicily. When he goes on to add some Attic honey to his olio, Trygæus can scarcely restrain himself from giving vent aloud to the remonstrance which he utters in an “aside”—not to use so terribly expensive an article. Tumult is forthwith despatched (with a cuff on the head for his slowness) to fetch a pestle of sufficient weight for hismaster’s purpose. He goes to Athens first; but their great war-pestle has just been lost—Cleon, the mainstay of the war party, has been killed in battle at Amphipolis, in Thrace. The messenger is next despatched to Sparta, but returns with no better success: the Spartans had lent their pestle to the Thracians, and Brasidas had fallen, with the Athenian general, in that same battle at Amphipolis. Trygæus, who all this while has been trembling in his hiding-place, begins to take heart, while War retires with his slave to manufacture a new pestle for himself. Now, in his absence, is the great opportunity to rescue Peace from her imprisonment. Trygæus shouts to all good Greeks, especially the farmers, the tradesmen, and the working classes, to come to his aid; and a motley Chorus, equipped with shovels, ropes, and crow-bars, appear in answer to his call. They give him a good deal of annoyance, however, because, true to their stage business as Chorus, instead of setting to work at once they will waste the precious minutes in dancing and singing,—a most incongruous proceeding, as he observes, when everything depends upon speed and silence; an amusing sarcasm from a writer of what we may call operatic burlesque upon the conventional absurdities which are even more patent in our modern serious opera than in Athenian comedy. At last they go to work in earnest, and succeed in bribing Mercury, who returns when War is out of the way, to help them. But to get Peace out of the pit requires, as Trygæus tells them, “a long pull, and a strong pull, and a pull altogether.” And first the Bœotians will not pull, and then theArgives, and then the Megarians; and Lamachus, the impersonation of the war party at Athens here as in ‘The Acharnians,’ gets in the way, and has to be removed; until at last the “country party”—the husbandmen—lay hold with a will, and Peace, with her companions “Plenty” and “Holiday,” represented also by two beautiful women, is drawn up from the pit, and hailed with great joy by Trygæus and the Chorus. But Peace, for a while, stands silent and indignant in the midst of their congratulations. She will not open her lips, says Mercury, in the presence of this audience. She has confided the reason to him in a whisper—for she never speaks throughout the play: she is angry at having been thrice rejected by vote in the Athenian assembly when she offered herself to them after the affair of Pylos. But she is soon so far appeased, that with her two fair companions she accompanies Trygæus to earth. The beetle remains behind—having received an appointment to run under Jupiter’s chariot and carry the lightning.

The last act—which, as is commonly the case with these comedies, is quite supplementary to what we moderns should call the catastrophe of the piece—takes place in front of Trygæus’s country house, where he celebrates his nuptials with the fair Opóra (Plenty), whom Mercury has presented to him as the reward of his good service. The festival held on the occasion is represented on the stage with a detail which was probably not tedious to an Athenian audience. All who ply peaceful arts and trades are freely welcomed to it; while those who make their gain by war—the sooth-sayer who promulgates his warlike oracles to delude men’s minds, the trumpeter, the armourer, and the singer of war-songs—are all dismissed by the triumphant vine-dresser with ignominy and contempt.

One little point in this play is worth notice, as a trait of generous temper on the part of the dramatist. Cleon, his great personal enemy, was now dead. He has not been able to restrain himself from aiming a blow at him even now, as one of those whom he looks upon, justly or unjustly, as the authors of the miseries of Greece. But he holds his hand half-way. When Mercury is descanting upon some of these evils which went near to the ruin of Athens, he is made to say that “the Tanner”—i.e., Cleon—was the cause of them. Trygæus interrupts him,—

Hold—say not so, good master Mercury;Let that man rest below, where now he lies.He is no longer of our world, but yours.

This forbearance towards his dead enemy is turned off, it is true, with a jest to the effect that anything bad which Mercury could say of him now would be a reproach to that ghostly company of which the god had especial charge; but even under the sarcasm we may willingly think there lies a recognition of the great principle, that the faults of the dead should be buried with them.

The comedy of ‘Lysistrata,’ which was produced some ten years later, deals with the same subject from quite a different point of view. The war has nowlasted twenty-one years. The women of Athens have grown hopeless of any termination of it so long as the management of affairs is left in the hands of the men, and impatient of the privations which its continuance involves. They determine, under the leading of the clever Lysistrata,[24]wife to one of the magistrates, to take the question into their own hands. They resolve upon a voluntary separation from their husbands—a practical divorcea mensa et thoro—until peace with Sparta shall be proclaimed. The meeting of these fair conspirators is called very early in the morning, while the husbands (at least such few of them as the campaign has left at home) are in bed and asleep. By a liberal stage licence, the women of Sparta (who talk a very broad Doric), of Corinth, and Bœotia, and, in fact, the female representatives generally of all Greece, attend the gathering, in spite of distance and of the existence of the war. All take an oath to observe this self-denying ordinance strictly—not without an amusing amount of reluctance on the part of some weaker spirits, which is at last overcome by the firm example of a Spartan lady. It is resolved that a body of the elder matrons shall seize the Acropolis, and make themselves masters of the public treasury. These form one of the two Choruses in the play, the other being composed of the old men of Athens. The latter proceed (with a good deal of comic difficulty, owing to the steepness of the ascent and their shortness of breath) to attack the Acropolis,armed with torches and fagots and pans of charcoal, with which they hope to smoke out the occupants. But the women have provided themselves with buckets of water, which they empty on the heads of their assailants, who soon retire discomfited to call the police. But the police are in their turn repulsed by these resolute insurgents, whom they do not exactly know how to deal with. At last a member of the Public Committee comes forward to parley, and a dialogue takes place between him and Lysistrata. Why, he asks, have they thus taken possession of the citadel? They have resolved henceforth to manage the public revenues themselves, is the reply, and not allow them to be applied to carrying on this ruinous war. 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!”[25]But they will put up with it no longer. As they have always had witenough to clear the tangled threads in their work, so they have no doubt of settling all these difficulties and complications in international disputes, if it is left to them. But what concern, her opponent asks, can women have with war, who contribute nothing to its dangers and hardships? “Contribute, indeed!” says the lady—“we contribute the sons who carry it on.” 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!”

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 whichmustbe 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 atAthens. 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.Theycannot 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 anAthenian 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.

Thesatire 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 theirtalents 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 tobelieve 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 thosesuch 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. Whyshould 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]

But besides this, the author who was to write a new burlesque for the Athenians, and had resolved to take as his theme these modern vagaries of speculative philosophy, wanted a central figure for his piece. So in ‘The Acharnians’ he takes Lamachus, a well-known general of the day, to represent the passion for war which he there holds up to ridicule, and dresses him up with gorgon-faced shield and tremendous crest, in parody of military splendour: though we have no reason whatever to suppose that he had any private grudge against the man, or that Lamachus was more responsible for the war than others. Here the representative figure must be a philosopher, and well known. Whether his opinions were very accurately represented or not, probably neither the dramatist nor his audience would very much care. 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, andwhose 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? There is surely no need to imagine that the comic dramatist had any personal grudge against the philosopher, or any special horror of his particular teaching. Such an artist could hardly have helped caricaturing him, if he had been his personal friend.

The opening scene in this comedy is an interior. It represents a room in the house of Strepsiades, a well-to-do citizen, in which he and his son Pheidippides are discovered occupying two pallet-beds. The household slaves are supposed to be sleeping in an outer room, the door of which is open. So much of the antecedents of the drama as is required to be known in order to its ready comprehension come out at once in the soliloquy of the anxious father.

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