CHORUS OF CLOUDS (nearer). "Sisters who bring the showers, Let us arise and greet This glorious land, for Pallas' dwelling meet, Where comes no foot profane, When for the mystic rites the Holy Doors unfold. To the great gods, and pious prayers are said; There at each holy tide, With coronals and song, The glad processions to the altars throng; There in the jocund spring, Great Bacchus, festive king, With dance and tuneful flute his Chorus leads along." W. L. COLLINS. But though the Clouds assist Socrates in teaching Strepsiades, the pupil proves an utter dunce. Finally, in a moment of impatience, Socrates kicks him out of the school. At last Pheidippides is prevailed upon to study with the Sophists. He proves an apt scholar, rapidly developing into an unprincipled scamp. When his education as a sharper is completed, he brings to bear his specious arguments against the creditors, and cheats them out of their dues. So far, so good; but his notions of filial duty have also been greatly modified by the instructions of Socrates. A quarrel arising in the family, he hesitates not to fall upon his father with a cudgel, and threatens to do the same by his mother if she provokes him. With a curse upon Socrates, the outraged old gentleman calls his slaves, hurries to the Thinking-school, and sets fire to the building. Thus the play ends. Beneath the pleasantry of Aristophanes is a substratum of solid sense; as is apparent in "the Birds," an ingenious play in which the woodland songsters take characters. It was pro duced at a time when the Athenians, puffed up with vanity, confidently looked for the reduction of Sicily and the dominion of Greece. Aristophanes alone, at this critical period, ventured to raise the note of warning, and satirize their foolish ambition. The choruses in this drama ring with the sweet music of the wild woods; they were rendered by twenty-four performers plumed so as to represent as many different kinds of birds. The Hoopoe thus calls his fellows to a mass-meeting: "Hoop! hoop! One and all, Birds of a feather, All together. Birds of an humble gentle bill Smooth and shrill, Dieted on seeds and grain, Rioting on the furrowed plain, Pecking, hopping, Picking, popping, Among the barley newly sown. Birds of bolder, louder tone, On the summer berries browsing, You that in an humbler station, You that in a squadron driving All the feathered airy nation, For an envoy, queer and shrewd, For the welfare of the state. With a hurry, scurry, Hurry to the meeting and attend to the debate." FRERE. STYLE OF ARISTOPHANES.-In weighing the merits of Aristophanes, it must be remembered that many of his peculiar beauties cannot be translated, and that we lose his local hits from our inability to see things from an Athenian standpoint. He is often indelicate in his allusions; he is as ready with town slang and the cant of the shop as with the most elegant phrase. But Attic salt seasons the whole, and none ever handled the versatile Greek tongue more deftly. In his command of language, he is equalled only by Plato, who felt the comic poet's power when he said that in the soul of Aristophanes the Graces sought an imperishable shrine. Amid all his humor and buffoonery sparkles genius of the highest order. His aim seems to have been to elevate his art. Some of the improvements he claimed to have introduced, are thus set forth in an address which he puts into the mouth of the leader of the chorus in his "Peace :" "It was he that indignantly swept from the stage the paltry ignoble device Of a Hercules needy and seedy and greedy, a vagabond sturdy and stout, Now baking his bread, now swindling instead, now beaten and battered about. And freedom he gave to the lacrimose slave who was wont with a howl to rush in, And all for the sake of a joke which they make on the wounds which disfigure his skin. Such vulgar contemptible lumber at once he bade from the drama depart, And then, like an edifice stately and grand, he raised and ennobled THOROLD ROGERS. the art." COMEDIES OF ARISTOPHANES. 221 Aristophanes outlived the license of the old comedy, which died with liberty. When in 404 B.C. the popular government was overthrown, and Thirty Tyrants, supported by Sparta, lorded it over Athens, a statute was passed making personal attacks on the stage capital offences; an actor who defied the law was actually starved to death. Thenceforth the comic poet dared not individualize the object of his satire; he tilted against vice and folly in general, or thrust at his intended victims indirectly under assumed names. Aristophanes died about 380 B.C. No other comic poet could vie with him during his lifetime; none worthy to be his successor arose after his death, for "Nature broke the mould in which he was cast." Of fifty-four comedies from his pen, eleven remain entire. During this halcyon age of Greek poetry, prose also was cultivated, and in the century following the Persian Wars it was brought to maturity. After the victories that secured her freedom, Greece felt the need of a national historian to record the story of her struggles and triumphs. The earliest narrators, as has been shown, confined themselves to mythology and tradition: the times now demanded an artist who could paint with faithful pencil on living canvas those scenes that were the glory of Hellas-and in Herodotus of Halicarnassus that artist appeared. Herodotus (born 484 B.C.).-Halicarnassus was the capital. of a Dorian confederacy of states in southern Asia Minor. Its queen Artemisia supported Xerxes in his quarrel with Greece; and although the Athenians, provoked that a woman. should take the field against them, offered an immense reward for her capture, she escaped the perils of war, and carried her kingdom safely through the political troubles of the time. The parents of Herodotus were persons of rank and property. His writings prove him to have been well read in the literature of his country. Though not an Ionian born, he adopted the Ionic dialect-the dress in which Greek prose first appeared. Herodotus spent the best twenty years of his life in travelling over the greater part of the known world, studying the history, geography, and customs of the countries he visited. Thebes and Memphis, Tyre and Jerusalem, Babylon and Ecbat'ana-with all he made personal acquaintance, extending his tour as far west as the Greek settlements in Italy, and as far south as the first cataract of the Nile. The marvellousness of the stories he collected brought down upon Herodotus the ridicule of his fellow-citizens; so quitting Halicarnassus when about thirty-seven years of age, he settled at Athens. Here, it is related, he read his history, still in the rough, to the admiring people, who voted him a handsome reward. Here also he seems to have become intimate with Sophocles and his great contemporaries; and here, perhaps, his ambition was kindled to add another star to the galaxy that made Athens the glory of the world. |