Delphi Complete Works of Aristophanes (Illustrated) (Delphi Ancient Classics) (139 page)

ἐγὼ δὲ τί ποιῶ;

Χρεμύλος
τὰς χύτρας, αἷς τὸν θεὸν
ἱδρυσόμεθα, λαβοῦσ᾽ ἐπὶ τῆς κεφαλῆς φέρε
σεμνῶς: ἔχουσα δ᾽ ἦλθες αὐτὴ ποικίλα.

Γρα
ῦ
ς

1200
ὧν δ᾽ οὕνεκ᾽ ἦλθον;

Χρεμύλος
πάντα σοι πεπράξεται.
ἥξει γὰρ ὁ νεανίσκος ὡς σ᾽ εἰς ἑσπέραν.

Γρα
ῦ
ς

ἀλλ᾽ εἴ γε μέντοι νὴ Δί᾽ ἐγγυᾷ σύ μοι
ἥξειν ἐκεῖνον ὡς ἔμ᾽, οἴσω τὰς χύτρας.

Χρεμύλος

καὶ μὴν πολὺ τῶν ἄλλων χυτρῶν τἀναντία
1205
αὗται ποιοῦσι: ταῖς μὲν ἄλλαις γὰρ χύτραις
ἡ γραῦς ἔπεστ᾽ ἀνωτάτω, ταύτης δὲ νῦν
τῆς γραὸς ἐπιπολῆς ἔπεισιν αἱ χύτραι.

Χορός

οὐκ ἔτι τοίνυν εἰκὸς μέλλειν οὐδ᾽ ἡμᾶς, ἀλλ᾽ ἀναχωρεῖν
ἐς τοὔπισθεν: δεῖ γὰρ κατόπιν τούτων ᾁδοντας ἕπεσθαι.

The seats in the Theatre of Dionysus, Athens

A Victorian artist’s impression of the theatre in its heyday

Aristophanes is an elusive poet. The main religious convictions of Aeschylus may be determined with certainty from his extant plays; attentive study of the dramas of Euripides reveals his cardinal opinions on politics, society and religion, and his philosophic attitude; but who can affirm with confidence that he has penetrated the comic mask of Aristophanes and knows his beliefs? The poet’s mocking irony baffles and perplexes his reader at almost every turn.

One element of the poet’s irony is his apparent frankness. He has at times the air of desiring to be taken seriously and seems to be expressing honest convictions. He is very suggestive and provokes reflection, but the attempt to reduce his opinions to system reveals the illusion. We become uneasily conscious that the great satirist is laughing behind his mask.

A proof of this deceptive quality of the poet’s humour is found in the diversity of the opinions that have been held as to his purpose in writing. It was once the fashion among modern interpreters to take him very seriously, — the comic poet disappeared in the reformer. He was eulogized as a moralist and patriot, whose lofty purpose was to instruct his fellow-countrymen; as an earnest thinker, who had reflected deeply on the problems of society and government and had made Comedy simply the vehicle of his reforming ideas; as a wise and discerning counsellor, who was competent to advise the citizens of Athens at a critical time on political questions and whose judgement of men and measures was sound; as a stern man withal, resolute in the performance of duty, the implacable and victorious foe of all, wherever found, who undermined the glory of Athens. This view, which Grote combated
(History of Greece,
lxvii), finds vigorous expression in the
Apology
of Robert Browning:

          “Next, whom thrash?

Only the coarse fool and the clownish knave?

Higher, more artificial, composite

Offence should prove my prowess, eye and arm!

Not who robs henroost, tells of untaxed figs,

Spends all his substance on stewed ellops-fish,

Or gives a pheasant to his neighbour’s wife:

No! strike malpractice that affects the State,

The common weal — intriguer or poltroon,

Venality, corruption, what care I

If shrewd or witless merely? — so the thing

Lay sap to aught that made Athenai bright

And happy, change her customs, lead astray

Youth or age, play the demagogue at Pnux,

The sophist in Palaistra, or — what’s worst,

As widest mischief, — from the Theatre

Preach innovation, bring contempt on oaths,

Adorn licentiousness, despise the Cult.

Thus vaunts the poet, as Browning interprets him, just after the great victory won at Arginusae. “Sparta is at our feet, a new day dawns, the War is at an end. For Athens has at length learnt the bitter lesson she might have been spared had she yielded to my pleas for peace.” The actual history of the next twelve months is pathetic. The battle at Arginusae, in which Callicratidas fell, restored the maritime supremacy of Athens, but peace was not secured. The Spartans made overtures, but the Athenian people, paying small heed to the “good counsels” that their Poet had given them in the
Acharnians,
the
Peace,
the
Lysistrata,
and in other comedies no longer extant, followed the lead of drunken Cleophon and rejected the Spartan proposals, just as five years before they had committed the grave error of accepting his advice after the Athenian victory at Cyzicus. Sparta bestirred herself, Lysander was sent out, and within a year Athenian arms suffered irretrievable reverse at Aegospotami.

The poet’s counsels of peace were rejected. Peace came only with disaster. His “sage” solutions of many other burning questions were equally ineffective. If Aristophanes was working for reform, as a long line of learned interpreters of the poet have maintained, the result was lamentably disappointing: he succeeded in effecting not a single change. He wings the shafts of his incomparable wit at all the popular leaders of the day — Cleon, Hyperbolus, Peisander, Cleophon, Agyrrhius, in succession, and is reluctant to unstring his bow even when they are dead. But he drove no one of them from power; there is little evidence, indeed, that he damaged their influence or even disturbed their brazen self-confidence. Cleon, when the poet’s libellous personal abuse became even in his judgement indecent, promptly brought him to his knees.

“When Cleon pressed me hard and tanned my hide, and outsiders laughed to see the sport, I confess” — Aristophanes says in the
Wasps
— “I played the ape a bit.” He adds significantly that he failed to get popular support in this quarrel. The inference is that the people did not think badly of Cleon; but modern opinion of the popular leaders in Athens, formed on the evidence that Aristophanes is supposed to furnish, has been persistently unfavourable, and Cleon’s rehabilitation as a sagacious, if turbulent, statesman who consistently maintained the imperial policy of Pericles has been slow.

The poet vehemently protested, it has been said, against the New Education, and viewing the whole intellectual tendency of his time with alarm, pleaded for a restoration of the simple discipline that had moulded the morals and minds and manners of the hardy men who fought at Marathon. Furthermore, he clearly apprehended the evils inherent in the Athenian system of judicature, which committed the administration of justice to a horde of common men, ignorant of the law, swayed by the impulse of the moment, “monsters of caprice and injustice,” and ruthlessly exposed the unrighteousness of its proceedings. Finally, reverent of the best traditions of the stage, he stood forth, it is alleged, as their uncompromising defender, and sternly resisted the innovations that were gradually changing the spirit and the form of tragedy during the last third of the’ century, and for a generation relentlessly pursued xii their chief exponent, concealing an attack that was meant to ruin him under the veil of caricature, parody, burlesque, and satire. But Socrates still frequented, winter and summer, the gymnasia, the market and the schools, and the Sophists continued to discourse and draw their pay; Philocleon, after a single experience of the pleasures of polite society, again forgathered with his cronies before the dawn of day and trudged away to Court; and Euripides, calmly disregarding the malicious strictures of his youthful critic, continued to write tragedy in his own manner and to present on the stage plays that were heard by the young men of Athens with wild acclaim.

This extreme conception of the function of Greek comedy as chiefly censorial and monitory has been modified with larger and more exact knowledge of the times in which the poet lived and of the conditions of life under which he wrote, but it has had unfortunate consequences. These plays have been regarded as a trustworthy source of information in establishing the facts of Greek history, biography, and institutions. So serious an interpretation of a form of literature of which the primary intention must always be entertainment and amusement inevitably obscured the poet’s elusive humour. A jest became a statement of fact, a caricature a portrait, a satire a document. The poet’s conception, clothed in a fantastical disguise that rivalled the grotesque dress of his own actors, has been essentially misapprehended in an entire play.

On the other hand the mistaken disposition, recently manifested, to regard Aristophanes simply as a jester and to deny that he had any other purpose than to provoke laughter is an extreme, though natural, reaction. This view denies at the same time, as might have been expected, the cathartic efficacy of Greek tragedy. The highest comedy, typed in the earlier plays of Aristophanes, and in some of the comedies of Molière, is regenerative, the purpose of Aristophanes in the
Acharnians,
in which the action turns upon the impossible and fantastic whimsy of an Athenian farmer securing peace with Sparta for himself and his family alone, is to ridicule the war-party. Nobody would have been more amused than the poet if he had been told that his play was to stop the fighting, but he did believe that the War was an evil, and so far his heart was honestly in his theme; and I have no doubt that many a man who had laughed uproariously at the peace-loving farmer set single-handed in the comedy against a quarrelsome chorus, a powerful general, the whole tribe of sycophants, and the demagogue Cleon in the background, went home from the play less content with, the course of his political leaders and longing in his heart for the good old days of peace. The instrument by which the poet probed the popular discontent was that most effective of all means when skilfully used — a laugh.

To regard Aristophanes as merely a jester is to mistake the man. Ridicule of contemporary persons, that is generally good-natured, or systems or prevailing ideas is his main purpose, I think, in his plays. His praise is for the dead. This ridicule, which ranges from satire to airy conceit, is made humorous by centering it in a far-fetched fantastic conception that is not the less available if it is impossible. Facts are exaggerated or invented with superb nonchalance and bewildering semblance of reality. In these mad revels of unrestrained fancy is difficult to lay hands upon Aristophanes the man. Nevertheless we do discover probable indications of is attachments and beliefs. He lived in an age of intellectual unrest when many vital questions pressed or solution. That a man of his intelligence did not jive them consideration and reach conclusions is impossible. No doubt he detested a debauchee — let Ariphrades bear witness, — but he must have sympathized with the revolt of the young men of his day against the severe and meagre discipline in which youth were trained during the first half of the century, and must have shared in their eager interest in the new subjects of knowledge. No doubt he deprecated the vicious use of the skill for which Strepsiades clamours in the
Clouds,
but he had too keen a mind to fail to distinguish between the right and the wrong use of this power or to reject all study of the art of persuasion because it might be abused. He was himself a skilful dialectician, as the Debates found in nearly all his comedies prove. He was acquainted with Socrates and must have known that he never misused his wonderful dialectical power, and must have felt an expert’s special thrill of pleasure in observing with what skill he employed it. Furthermore, the times in which the poet lived were troublous; the fate of Athens again and again stood on the razor’s edge. He was not indifferent to the welfare of his country nor of his fellow-countrymen. There is a serious undertone in the
Acharnians
that gives it an indescribable elevation, and in the
Lysistrata,
a Rabelaisian play written after the disaster to Athenian arms in Sicily, in which, Thucydides records, fleet and army utterly perished, and of the many who went forth few returned home, there are verses of intensest pathos that betray the poet’s poignant sympathy: