Greek drama had reached its summit and was nearing its decline when Aristophanes began to write. Of the Old Comedy, as it is called, we have little; none of the plays of Aristophanes’ often successful rivals, and only eleven of the many he himself wrote; but the genre is clearly to be seen in those eleven. There were but three actors. A chorus divided the action by song and dance (there was no curtain) and often took part in the dialogue. About half-way through, the plot, a very loose matter at best, came practically to an end, and the chorus made a long address to the audience, which aired the author’s opinions and often had nothing to do with the play. After that would follow scenes more or less connected. A dull picture, this, of a brilliantly entertaining reality. Nobody and nothing escaped the ridicule of the Old Comedy. The gods came in for their share; so did the institutions dearest to the Athenians; so did the most popular and powerful individuals, often by name. The freedom of speech is staggering to our ideas.
In the passages that follow the metres of the originals have been reproduced, as they are an essential part of the comic effect. When the Acharnians opens a man is explaining how the war started:
For men of ours—I do not say the City,
Remember that—I do not say the City,
But worthless fellows, just bad money, coins
No mint has ever seen, kept on denouncing
The men of Megara. Trifles, I grant,
—Our way here—but some tipsy youngsters then
Go steal from Megara a hussy there.
Then men of Megara come here and steal
Two of Aspasia’s minxes. And those three,
No better than they should be, caused the war.
For then in wrath Olympian Pericles
Thundered and lightened and confounded Greece.
Enacting laws against the Megarians
That sounded just like drinking songs—
But it was not only the great who had cause to feel uneasy. Any man might suddenly find himself mocked at by name. The Wasps opens with two servants discussing their master’s father:
FIRST SLAVE: He’s got a strange disease
Nobody knows—Or will you try a guess?
(Looking at audience.)
Amynias down there, Pronapes’ son,
Says it’s a dice-disease, but he’s quite off.
SECOND SLAVE: Ah—diagnosing from his own disease.
FIRST SLAVE: But Sosias here, in front declares he knows
That it’s a drink disease.
SECOND SLAVE: No—no—confound it!
That’s the disease of honest gentlemen.
The names, of course, were changed as the audience changed. In a town that was small enough for everyone to know everyone else, the possibilities the method offered were endless.
The best known of Aristophanes’ plays are the Birds, where Athens is shown up in contrast to the utopian city the birds build in the clouds; the Frogs, a parody of popular writers; the Clouds, which makes fun of the intelligentsia and Socrates who “walks on air and contemplates the sun” and three plays about women, the Thesmophoriazusæ, the Lysistrata, and the Ecclesiazusæ, in which the women take hold of literature, the war, and the state, to the great betterment of all.
The characters have little in common with Plato’s. The delightful host of the Symposium, the courteous, witty Agathon, is a different person as seen by Aristophanes. In the Thesmophoriazusæ Euripides and an elderly man, Mnesilochus, are walking along a street:
EURIPIDES: That house is where great Agathon is living, The tragic poet.
MNESILOCHUS: Agathon? Don’t know him.
EURIPIDES: Why, he’s the Agathon—
MNESILOCHUS: interrupting A big dark fellow, eh?
EURIPIDES: Oh, no, by no means. Haven’t you ever seen him?
But let us step aside. His servant’s coming.
He’s got some myrtle and a pan of charcoal.
He’s going to pray for help in composition.
SERVANT: Let sacred silence rule us here.
Ye people all, lock up your lips,
For the Muses are reveling there within,
The Queens of poetry-making.
Let the air be still and forget to blow,
And the gray sea wave make never a sound—
MNESILOCHUS: Stuff and nonsense—
EURIPIDES: Will you be quiet!
SERVANT: (scandalized) What’s this that I hear?
MNESILOCHUS: Oh, just as you said.
It’s the air that’s forgetting to blow.
SERVANT: He’s making a play.
First the keel he will lay
With neatly joined words all new,
Then the bottom he’ll round,
And chisel the sound,
And fasten the verses with glue.
A maxim he’ll take,
And an epithet make;
And call by new names what is old.
He’ll form it like wax
And fill in the cracks,
And cast it at last in a mold.
(Enter Agathon. He has on a silk dress and his hair is in a net.)
MNESILOCHUS: Who are you? Were you born a man?
No, you’re a woman surely.
AGATHON: Know, sir, I choose my dress to suit my writing.
A poet molds himself upon his poems,
And when he writes of women he assumes
A woman’s dress and takes on woman’s habits.
But when he sings of men a manly bearing
Is his therewith. What we are not by nature
We take unto ourselves through imitation.
Socrates fares no better. Aristophanes had noted well the homely imagery Socrates loved to illustrate high discourse with. In the Clouds a father goes to “The thinking-school” to enter his son, and there as he is being shown around, he sees a curious spectacle:
FATHER: Well now. Who’s that—that man up in the basket?
STUDENT: Himself!
FATHER: Who is Himself?
STUDENT: Why, Socrates.
FATHER: Dear me. That Socrates? Oh, call him for me.
STUDENT: Really, I haven’t time. Call him yourself.
FATHER: O Socrates! O—dear—sweet—Socrates!
SOCRATES: Mortal! Why call you on me?
FATHER: Tell me, please,
What are you doing up there in a basket?
SOCRATES: I walk on air and con-template the sun.
I could not search into celestial matters
Unless I mingled with the kindred air
My subtle spirit here on high. The ground
Is not the place for lofty speculations.
The earth would draw their essence to herself.
The same too is the case with watercress.
FATHER: Well, well. Thought draws the essence into watercress.
The two passages illustrate a further point: they presuppose an educated audience, perfectly at home in the best thought and literature of the day. It is the pre-supposition of all the plays. The intellectual side of the society Plato knew is constantly suggested. Much of the fun in the Frogs turns on parodies of Æschylus and Euripides which imply an exhaustive acquaintance with them on the part of the spectators, and as Æschylus is said to have written ninety plays and Euripides seventy-five, it meant something substantial in the way of culture to be well-read in them. Occasionally too we catch a faraway glimpse of people by whom the arts are taken seriously. In the Clouds, the father who entered his son in Socrates’ thinking-school, finds him much the worse therefor. He pours out his complaints:
I told him to go and fetch his harp and help the supper along
By singing us good Simonides’ Ram or another fine old song.
But he replied that to sing at meals was coarse and quite out of style,
And Simonides now was obsolete—had been for a good long while.
I really could hardly restrain myself at his finicking, poppycock ways,
But I did and I asked him to give us then
a selection from Æschylus’ plays.
But he answered, “Æschylus is to me an unmitigated bore,
A turgid, swollen-up, wind-bag thing that does nothing but ramp and roar.”
When he talked like that my bosom began to heave extremely fast,
But I kept myself in and politely said, “Then give us one of the last,
Of the very newest you young men like.” And he started a shameful thing
Euripides wrote, the sort of stuff no gentleman ever would sing,
Then, then, I could bear no more. I confess, I stormed and struck him too,
And he turned on me, his own father, he did, and beat me black and blue.
SON: And rightly too when you dared to blame that wisest of poets—he
Who is high over all, Euripides.
FATHER: The boy’s just a fool, I see.
But these are only shadowy glimpses, and few and far between, at that. Aristophanes’ Athens is for the most part inhabited by a most disreputable lot of people, as unplatonic as possible. The Plutus begins with a scene where a blind man is groping his way along a street, followed by an elderly, respectable-appearing man and his slave. The slave asks his master why they are following a blind man:
CHREMYLUS: I’ll tell you why, straight out. Of all my slaves
I know you are the best, most constant—thief.
Well—I have been a good, religious man,
But always poor—no luck.
SLAVE: And so you have.
CHREMYLUS: While a church robber, and those thieves who live
On politics, get rich.
SLAVE: And so they do.
CHREMYLUS: So then I went to ask—not for myself,
I’ve pretty well shot all my arrows now—
But for my son, my only son. I prayed
That he might change his ways and turn into
A scoundrel, wicked, rotten through and through,
And so live happily forever after.
The god replied, the first man I fell in with
To follow.
SLAVE: Yes—Quite good. Of course, a blind man
Can see it’s better nowadays to be
A rotten scoundrel.
The man in front proves to be Wealth himself, not aware of his power because he is blind. The two others proceed to enlighten him.
CHREMYLUS: Why, everything there is, is just Wealth’s slave.
The girls, now, if a poor man comes along,
Will they look at him? But just let a rich one,
And he can get a deal more than he wants.
SLAVE: Oh, not the sweet, good, modest girls. They never
Would ask a man for money.
CHREMYLUS: No? What then?
SLAVE: Presents—the kind that cost a lot—that’s all.
CHREMYLUS: Well, all the voting’s done for Wealth of course.
You man our battleships. You own our army.
When you’re an ally, that side’s sure to win.
Nobody ever has enough of you.
While all things else a man can have too much of—
Of love.
SLAVE: Of loaves.
CHREMYLUS: Of literature.
SLAVE: Of candy.
CHREMYLUS: Of fame.
SLAVE: Of figs.
CHREMYLUS: Of manliness.
SLAVE: Of mutton.
This kind of invective has a certain familiar ring in our ears. Writers who hold their own country and their own times to be the worst possible ever, can, it appears, trace their descent back through a great many centuries.
The playwright most like Aristophanes, the man whose sense of humor was most akin to his, lived in an age as unlike his as Shakespeare’s was like it. The turbulent democracy that gave birth to the Old Comedy, and the England over whose manners and customs Queen Victoria ruled supreme, had little in common, and yet the mid-Victorian Gilbert of Pinafore fame saw eye to eye with Aristophanes as no other writer has done. The differences between Aristophanes and Gilbert are superficial; they are due to the differences of their time. In their essential genius they are alike.
The unknown is always magnificent. Aristophanes wears the halo of Greece, and is at the same time softly dimmed by the dust of centuries of scholarly elucidation. A comparison, therefore, with an author familiar and beloved and never really thought about wears a look of irreverence—also of ignorance. Dear nonsensical Gilbert, and the magnificent Aristophanes, poet, political reformer, social uplifter, philosophical thinker, with a dozen titles to immortality—how is it possible to compare them? The only basis for true comparison, Plato says, is the excellence that is peculiar to each thing. Was Aristophanes really a great lyric poet? Was he really bent on reforming politics or ending democracy? Such considerations are beside the point. Shakespeare’s glory would not be enhanced if Hamlet’s soliloquy was understood as a warning against suicide, or if it could be proved that in Pericles he was attacking the social evil. The peculiar excellence of comedy is its excellent fooling, and Aristophanes’ claim to immortality is based upon one title only: he was a master maker of comedy, he could fool excellently. Here Gilbert stands side by side with him. He, too, could write the most admirable nonsense. There has never been better fooling than his, and a comparison with him carries nothing derogatory to the great Athenian.
Striking resemblances, both general and particular, emerge from such a comparison. The two men fooled in the same way; they looked at life with the same eyes. In Gilbert’s pages Victorian England lives in miniature just as Athens lives in Aristophanes’ pages. Those sweet pretty girls, those smart young dragoons, those match-making mammas; those genial exponents of the value of a title, a safe income, a political pull; that curious union of sentimental thinking and stoutly practical acting; that intimate savor of England in the eighteen eighties—who has ever given it so perfectly as he? He was one of the cleverest of caricaturists, but the freedom Aristophanes enjoyed was not his, and his deft, clear-cut pictures of dishonesty and sham and ignorance in high places are very discreet and always nameless. Essentially, however, he strikes with the same weapon as his Greek predecessor. He, too, ridicules the things dearest to his countrymen: the aristocracy in Lolanthe; army training in the Pirates; the navy in Pinafore; English society in Utopia Limited; and so on, through all his thirteen librettos. It is never cruel, this ridicule, as Aristophanes’ sometimes is, but this difference is the inevitable result of the enormous difference between the two men’s environment. The Athenian was watching cold and hunger and bitter defeat draw ever nearer to Athens. The Englishman wrote in the safest and most comfortable world mankind has ever known. But underneath that difference their fundamental point of view was the same. They were topical writers, both of them, given over to the matters of the moment, and yet Aristophanes has been laughed with for two thousand years, and Gilbert has survived a half century of such shattering change, his England seems almost as far away from us. They saw beneath the surface of the passing show. They wrote of the purely ephemeral and in their hands it became a picture not of the “Follies and Foibles” of a day and a nation, but of those that exist in all nations and all ages and belong to the permanent stuff of human nature.