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Updated: June 14, 2025
The authors of them wrote not like Eupolis and Aristophanes for a great nation, but rather for a cultivated society which spent its time, like other clever circles whose cleverness finds little fit scope for action, in guessing riddles and playing at charades.
Nor do I forget that in his eulogy of that consummate orator, Pericles, the comedy-writer Eupolis used the following language: "But besides his keenness, Persuasion sate upon his lips. So he charmed all ears and, alone of all our orators, left his thrill behind him in his hearer's minds."
Eupolis they tell us was agreeable in his jokes, and ingenious in covert allusions, so that he never needed the assistance of parabases to say whatever he wished, but that he was deficient in satiric power. But Aristophanes, they add, by a happy medium, united the excellencies of both, and that in him we have satire and pleasantry combined in due proportion and attractive manner.
Yet Plato had to testify for him the most renowned of the physicians, Hippocrates, Philistion, and Dioxippus the disciple of Hippocrates; and of the poets, Euripides, Aleaeus, Eupolis, and Eratosthenes, who all say that the drink passes through the lungs.
And as to the drama of Eupolis, in which he described what we call an Utopia, or Lubberly Land, what else was it but a parody of the poetical legends of the golden age?
Dictate therefore something worthy of your promises; begin. There is nothing. To what purpose was it to stow Plato upon Menander? Eupolis, Archilochus? For what end did you bring abroad such companions? What? are you setting about appeasing envy by deserting virtue? Wretch, you will be despised.
His greatest ambition was to impress his audience with a high opinion of his elegance, and not, as Eupolis relates of Pericles, to sting as well as to please.
For these are his words: I produce this because it is really his meaning, not because I want other testimonies, for Plato hath store of learned and sufficient men to join with him. For not to mention Eupolis, who in his play called the "Flatterers" says, Protagoras bids us drink a lusty bowl, That when the Dog appears our lungs may still be moist; or elegant Eratosthenes, who says,
The student in the museum could have read the lyric poems of Alcæus and Stersichorus, which in matter and style were excellent enough to be judged not quite so good as Homer; the tender lamentations of Simonides; the warm breathings of Sappho, the tenth muse; the pithy iambics of Archilochus, full of noble flights and brave irregularities; the comedies of Menander, containing every kind of excellence; those of Eupolis and Cratinus, which were equal to Aristophanes; the histories of Theopompus, which in the speeches were as good as Thucydides; the lively, agreeable orations of Hyperides, the accuser of Demosthenes; with the books of travels, chronologies, and countless others of less merit for style and genius, but which, if they had been saved, would not have left Egypt wholly without a history.
The comic writer Eupolis,22 I remember, mentions it in praise of that excellent orator Pericles, that "On his lips Persuasion hung, And powerful Reason rul'd his tongue: Thus he alone could boast the art To charm at once, and pierce the heart."
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