University of Virginia Library

It is necessary to repair an omission which the reader may have already noticed: among the Dramatis Personæ enumerated in page iv, no mention has been made of the chorus, from which as usual, the comedy derived its title—THE KNIGHTS. This body composing the middle order of the state were, as it appears, decidedly hostile to Cleon.—In the first lines of the preceding play, the merit of having procured his conviction and punishment on a charge of bribery is ascribed to them; and again in the same play, the Chorus express their detestation of the Demagogue by threatening to sacrifice him to the vengeance of the Knights,

In a review of Mr Mitchell's Aristophanes, a passage in his translation of one of the choruses is noted with particular commendation. It is said,—“Mr Mitchell has hit upon the very key-note of Aristophanes, whose choruses are so contrived throughout this play, as to afford a relief and contrast to the vulgar acrimony of the dialogue; not in their logical and grammatical sense, but in their form and rhythm, and in the selection of the words, which if heard imperfectly, would appear to belong to a grave or tender or beautiful subject.” If the occasion had admitted of it, this observation might have been applied more particularly to the first lines of each chorus; for we may remark instances in which the contrast of grave or graceful lines at the commencement, was intended to give additional force to the vehemence of invective immediately following in the chorus itself. Thus, in the original of the chorus which is given above, an expression of wonder and awe

The metre of the lines which follow, namely, the tetrameter-iambic, is so essentially base and vulgar, that no English song afforded a specimen fit to be quoted, and the songs themselves were not proper to be mentioned; at last, Mr Cornewall Lewis, (whose kind importunities had extorted the publication of the preceding play of the Acharnians) suggested as a produceable specimen, the first line of a sufficiently vulgar, but otherwise inoffensive song,

It would not be right that Mr Lewis's name should be mentioned here, without an acknowledgement of the obligations due to him, for his friendly zeal in forwarding that play through the press, and correcting some inaccuracies incidental to the work of a very unsystematic scholar.

The metre, of which so derogatory a character has been given, is always appropriated in the comedies of Aristophanes, to those scenes of argumentative altercation, in which the ascendancy is given to the more ignoble character; in this respect it stands in decided contrast with the anapœstic measure.

It is evident, that a scuffle or wrestling match takes place here between the two rivals. It continues during the verses of Demosthenes and those of the Chorus; the last of which mark, that the Sausage-seller has the advantage; and the Sausage-seller's speech of four lines, which follows, implies that he is at the same time exhibiting his adversary in a helpless posture.

It is to be observed, that the palæstra was not a mere school of wrestling or boxing.— The attention of the masters of the palæstra (like the dancing masters of former times in France and England) was directed to form their pupils to a general dignity and elegance of carriage.

Hence all awkward or indecent effort was disallowed in the palæstra of the better educated class.—But, as wrestling was an universal national exercise, it would of course be practised vulgarly among the vulgar; and there would be many tricks and casts retained and practised by the lowest class, which were rejected by the more dignified palæstra. The Sausage-seller was represented as foiling his opponent, by some unbecoming, unsightly effort, which was characteristic of a town blackguard. —Thus, the scuffle between them formed a kind of dumb show, analogous to, and illustrative of the dialogue; exhibiting in the triumph of the Sausage-seller, the peculiar advantages reserved for superior impudence and vulgarity both in word and deed.

The following parabasis has been already noticed (p. 35 of the Acharnians) in the long preliminary notice prefixed to the parabasis of that play; but the inference which is there so concisely assumed in the marginal note, will be better and more conveniently estimated, when placed in juxtaposition with the composition itself. —It has been said, in brief and strong terms, that the poet had become the poetical serf of the community.—Our knowledge of antiquity is too scanty, to enable us to define precisely the mode and degree of this vassalage, to which he thus voluntarily subjected himself; but it is evident, that by demanding (as the text has it) a chorus for himself, he was in effect doing that which is expressed in the translation, namely, embracing a profession, from which he could not retreat.—The whole tenor of the following parabasis turns upon the decisive and irretrievable step, which the poet (after long hesitation, and resisting the importunity of his friends) had at length determined to take, undeterred by the discouraging

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Yet the poet was already publicly known as the author of three comedies; the Daitaleis, in which he had exhibited the contrast of two young men, brothers: the one, steady and manly, according to the old fashion instructed in the old music and poetry, addicted to gymnastic exercises, living with his father in the country, a lover of hunting and rural sports; the other a thoroughly depraved town rake—a scamp of that new school, of which Alcibiades was the patron and the model; aspiring to distinguish himself by foppery, litigation, and speechifying.—That excellent comedy of Gresset's, Le Méchant, may be considered as somewhat analogous to this,— produced with the same intention, and in a state of society and manners not altogether dissimilar.

His second play, the Babylonians, has been already mentioned (see Ach. p. 34); of this he was avowedly the author, and had been held responsible for it, as we have already seen.

The Acharnians, his third play, is generally speaking a comic pleading in favor of peace; but it includes a justification of the poet as the author of the preceding play, (distinctly and palpably in the parabasis, and in a burlesque form in other parts); for Dicæopolis in his defence before the Chorus is the representative of the poet himself; and that portion of the Chorus, which continues inveterate and unappeased, bring an accusation against him, which has no reference to any thing which has occurred in the preceding scenes of the same play; but which is distinctly applicable to the main purport and argument of the Babylonians

The original, more scrupulously translated, would stand thus “abusing any man that happened to be an informer,” an offence, of which the Dicæopolis of the Acharnians (for the informer Nicarchus has not yet appeared) had been, up to this point at least, entirely guiltless. Dicæopolis then, in this instance, is a burlesque representative of the poet himself, put upon his trial for misdemeanours perpetrated in a former play. His adversaries attack him, for having stigmatized individuals as informers. The party who are become favorable to him, justify him, by affirming the truth and correctness of all his imputations.—The reply to this is, that though they might be true, he had no right to give publicity to scandalous and offensive truths; and that he deserves to be punished for it.—There is nothing in this altercation, which can in any way be made to bear the slightest reference to anything that had occurred in the preceding scenes of the play itself.

We have made a wide digression in our way to a very unsatisfactory conclusion.—It may be said: we see very clearly, from what has been already stated, that Aristophanes was already an avowed writer for the comic theatre; regarded as responsible for his productions, when they were deemed objectionable; justifying then himself

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We find moreover, that the comic poets received a salary from the state; for in the play of the Frogs, exhibited almost at the close of the war, at a time of great pecuniary difficulty, it seems, that their pay was reduced.—And the poet introduces his Chorus of happy spirits in the Elysian fields, excommunicating the economists—in company with other reprobates and profane persons who are warned to withdraw from the sacred rites:—they include, in their interdict,

This appears evidently not to have been serious; or if serious, would have been very unreasonable; for the retrenchment at that period was universal, extending even to the omnipotent jurymen, who were reduced from a daily pay of three oboli, to two. Whatever the retrenchment may have been, it seems, as is suggested above, not to have been one, which was seriously complained of; and we may safely infer, from the general munificence of the Athenians in all matters of art, and from their peculiar passion for the theatre, that in better and more prosperous times the allowances made to the comic poets must have been sufficiently liberal; at least to the three

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From the question of emoluments we may turn to that of privileges and immunities: and here, in the absence of positive authority, we may be contented for the present, with general inferences and analogy. According to the notions of heathen antiquity, a professed comic poet would have been considered as a person devoted to the service of Bacchus; a certain character of inviolability must therefore have been attached to him, in common with other persons separated and set apart from the common concerns of the state, and dedicated for life to the service of any other deity.— Though modified no doubt in later times, this principle was essentially inherent in the Grecian mind.—The slaughter of a poet, “a servant of the muses,” was condemned as an act of sacrilege; and it was in these terms, that the assassin of Archilochus was excommunicated by the oracle, and expelled from the temple, which he had presumed to enter. It is not conceivable, that these feelings, however modified, could have been altogether extinct, in the times of which we are now treating; and it is a singular fact, considering the enormous outrages and attacks upon private character, perpetrated by the comic poets, that (with the exception of the exploded fable of the death of Eupolis) there is no trace to be met with of any personal vengeance directed against any of them. The comic poets have been spoken of above, as persons separate and set apart from the ordinary concerns of the state; and so they must have been, either by positive law, or by established and authoritative custom; for it is not to be supposed, that to any man standing in all other respects upon an equal footing with his fellow citizens, the privilege should have been allowed, of assailing them with unlimited ribaldry and abuse.—Whatever may be thought of such a privilege in modern times; it was certainly not consonant to the spirit of antiquity, to allow it to be enjoyed by any individual, unaccompanied with corresponding disabilities. The office of a comic poet, during the reign of the Athenian democracy, has not been unaptly compared to that of the court-jester, during the middle ages. They were both of them authorised to take the most extraordinary liberties, in reflections on the sovereign, and the highest persons in the state; but theirs was a situation obviously incompatible with the exercise of any other office or privilege. The parallel may be carried further; for it would appear, from many recorded instances, that of these royal jesters many must have been men, not only of a lively fancy and imagination, but of just feelings and a sound judgment; whose privileged sallies occasionally directed the attention of the sovereign to truths,

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But to return to our subject: Thus far, in the absence of direct and positive information, an attempt has been made, by conjecture and inference, to define the new position, in which the poet was placing himself, as a member of the community to which he belonged; whether in this respect he had any reason to repent of his resolution, it would be idle and superfluous to risk any conjecture;—but in regard to his success as an author, the forebodings expressed in the parabasis, appear to have been verified.—Up to this time, while unengaged and at liberty, he had been courted by the public, and indulged with applause and success; for the strong feeling excited in the public by his play of the Babylonians, at first hostile, and gradually (like their representatives the chorus of Acharnians) subsiding into acquiescence and approbation, must have been felt as more than an equivalent to the highest theatrical success. But he was now irrevocably engaged in the service of the public: the first prize, as a kind of premium for enlisting, was awarded to the present play, the first which he exhibited as a regular writer for the stage; but from this time he was destined, like his predecessors, to experience the rigours and caprices of theatrical discipline. His next play was the Clouds, in which, following up the design of the Daitaleis, he had traced to its source that sudden change in morality and manners, of which the outward manifestations had been exhibited in the former play. This play of the Clouds, which he affirms (adjuring Bacchus as the patron deity of theatrical poets) to have been the best that ever was written, was rejected. The play of the Wasps, in which he thus asserted the merit of the Clouds, was acted in the following year, and obtained the first prize. But we find that another mortification had in the meanwhile befallen him, in the diminished zeal and ardor of his friends,—he had been, as the phrase is, “had up” by Cleon before the senate, and subjected to the infliction of a severe invective; during which time, he complains, that his friends and partizans who were in attendance, and upon whose countenance he depended, “had shown themselves indifferent and even amused.”—They imagined no doubt, that being once engaged, he must go on. But he tells them, that he does not mean to compromise himself to the same extent in future; and reminds them of the fable of the vine, which being left unsupported, ceased to produce fruit. (v. 1291.)

Here then we trace a turn in the poet's mind; he became less of a public personage: and though his fancy and wit remained the same, and his principles continued unchanged; and though his courage and spirit occasionally broke forth in public emergencies;

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But the text is already too much clogged with this long interpolation of prose. We will not stop therefore, to lament over the loss of the Daitaleis and the Babylonians, composed at an earlier period, and with an unbroken spirit.

But the money-loving spirit of our age manifests itself even in our literary researches, and we cannot refrain, even with respect to an ancient poet who lived 2300 years ago, from the invariable enquiry—What was he worth?—It may be inferred then, from grounds of presumption too long to be detailed here, that he must have belonged to the class of the knights. Now the knights were rated (according to the modus fixed by Solon) at an amount of 300 bushels of corn. But how rated?—As for the sum total of their income? Or as being that portion of it, which in cases of emergency was exigible for the service of the State?—Those students of antiquity, who are not endowed with the faculty of digesting gross absurdities, are under great obligations to Mr Boeck, for having relieved them from the cruel necessity of being constrained to believe, that a man with £75 a year (taking corn at five shillings a bushel) was bound to keep a war-horse, and to serve in the cavalry at his own expense; or that another with an income of £225 (estimated according to the same permanent standard of value) could have been charged with the expenses of a ship of war—a proposition we conceive, wholly contradictory to the experience of the members of the Yacht Club.—Mr Boeck has shewn, that these sums were the extreme rates of taxation to which the individuals of these classes were subject; a rate which was not always exacted in full; and which we may suppose at the utmost, to have been a double tithe or four shillings in the pound, a rate of taxation, to which in difficult times, our own country was contented to submit.—The elucidation of this point is by far the greatest service which Mr Boeck has rendered to ancient literature, in the whole of his accurate and learned work. To have dissipated these misapprehensions, which, as long they were implicitly adopted, diffused an air of utter incredibility and unreality over the whole system of antiquity, is a result far more important than the development of details hitherto unknown and unexamined.

This discussion, already too long, has been prolonged thus far for the sake of restating Mr Boeck's discovery; which has been unaccountably overlooked, in a recent publication.

With respect to the poet, we may safely conclude, that he was in tolerably easy circumstances; and we find accordingly that he was able to give away some of his plays

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The text contains nearly all that is known of two of the three poets here mentioned, Magnes and Crates; the last is recorded, as having become distinguished in the 2nd year of the 82 Olymp. 36 years before the exhibition of the knights: Magnes must have been older. Of Cratinus some few fragments are still in existence: he lived to vindicate himself from the offensive commiseration here bestowed upon him; by gaining the first prize in the next year, when the comedy of the Clouds was rejected.

The poet Carkinus (Crab) had produced a tragedy, on the subject of the daughter of a king of Corinth; who merely, from bathing in the sea, had become unconsciously pregnant by Neptune. The lines here quoted from it were a complaint of the impossibility of preserving the honor of illustrious families, from the licentious aggressions of the gods.

Cleon's Exordium appears to be marked in the original by a trait of humour which it is impossible to translate or to represent by an equivalent. The true version is as follows. “I pray to the goddess Minerva, my own patroness, and the protecting deity of the city; that if I stand as a meritorious statesman, in the next rank to Lysicles,

It should seem that the three discreditable names are substituted for those of Pericles Cymon and Themistocles, with whom it appears that Cleon was in the habit of comparing himself; for we shall see that in the present scene he is attacked for having presumed to place himself in parallel with Themistocles.

It is natural therefore to conclude; that with respect to the two other illustrious, but less extraordinary characters, he must have felt still less scrupulous.

The phrase therefore stands as a contemptuous caricature of Cleon's arrogance. He had spoken of himself as the most meritorious public character.

The taunting parody of the Poet says:

We see that the two first names have a similarity in sound to those for which they were substituted: (Pericles, Lysicles—Cymon, Cynna). And we may be sure that

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To those who have formed a just estimate of the merits of Aristophanes, this explanation of the passage will not appear unnecessary. It occurs in the most striking part of the play, at the very point to which the attention of the audience had been directed; but surely the most implicit admiration for every thing ancient cannot prevent us from perceiving, that, unexplained as it has been hitherto, it appears vapid and senseless in the extreme. We might safely defy the dullest individual to make a poorer attempt at a joke in his own person.

If on the contrary we suppose the passage in question to have contained a verbal burlesque heightened by personal mimicry, the audience would hardly have felt a deficiency of amusement at this particular point of the representation.

The following Chorus has no merit whatever in the translation; and not much in the original. The first 6 lines are composed on the principle of contrast pointed out in p. 25.

The Actors being withdrawn, the Chorus remain again in possession of the Theatre. Their first song is a parody from Pindar, which is converted into a lampoon upon Lysistratus, who having reduced himself to poverty had procured (by the assistance of his friends) a lucrative appointment at Delphi. He is mentioned in the Acharnians, see the song, p. 50.