United States or Mauritius ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Famine, the twin evil of pestilence, is not so easily forgotten, and the dominant note of Aristophanes, hunger, was the dominant note of life in the Confederacy, civil as well as military. The Confederate soldier was often on short rations, but the civilian was not much better off. I do not mean those whose larders were swept by the besom of the invaders.

Swift says of him, with a loving chuckle: 'But as for Comic Aristophanes, The dog too witty and too profane is.

Universal suffrage is Democracy. Is Democracy better than the aristocratic commonwealth? Look at the Greeks, who knew both forms; are they agreed which is the best? Plato, Thucydides, Xenophon, Aristophanes the Dreamer, the Historian, the Philosophic Man of Action, the penetrating Wit have no ideals in Democracy. Algernon Sidney, the martyr of liberty, allows no government to the multitude.

We look down upon a crowded amphitheatre. Out of the "Clouds" of Aristophanes, satire and humour are pouring down in streams upon the audience; on the stage Socrates, the most remarkable man in Athens, he who had been the shield and defence of the people against the thirty tyrants, is held up mentally and bodily to ridicule Socrates, who saved Alcibiades and Xenophon in the turmoil of battle, and whose genius soared far above the gods of the ancients.

I think that the succeeding lines in Aristophanes, also already quoted, justify the description which I have given of the rear-ranks of the Persians keeping up a flight of arrows over the heads of their comrades against the Greeks. B.C. 490 to 487. All Asia is filled with the preparations made by King Darius for a new expedition against Greece.

The last, as bequeathed to us by Aristophanes, has features which bear little family resemblance to the philosophical parodies of the Pythagorean poet.

Plato has also admirably characterised him in his Symposium, where he puts into his mouth a speech on love, which Aristophanes, far from every thing like high enthusiasm, considers merely in a sensual view. His description of it is, however, equally bold and ingenious. We might apply to the pieces of Aristophanes the motto of a pleasant and acute adventurer in Goethe: "Mad, but clever."

The original belongs to the kind which the Spaniards call Comedias de Figuron: it also has undoubtedly been spoiled by Scarron, The worst of the matter is, that his exaggerations are trifling without being amusing. Racine hit upon a very different plan of imitation from that which was then followed, in his Plaideurs, of which the idea is derived from Aristophanes.

What is the barrow of Thespis beside the Olympian chariots? What are Aristophanes and Plautus, beside the Homeric colossi, Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides? Homer bears them along with him, as Hercules bore the pygmies, hidden in his lion's skin! In the idea of men of modern times, however, the grotesque plays an enormous part.

I dare say that I too have omitted several things which might be said in praise of Love, but this was not intentional, and you, Aristophanes, may now supply the omission or take some other line of commendation; for I perceive that you are rid of the hiccough.