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Updated: June 16, 2025
Whether Plato or Aristophanes or even Thucydides, the Greek's feet touched the earth, touched it lovingly, though it might only be with the pressure of a toe, but there were always wings to his feet, he was always the embodiment of all that he symbolised in Hermes. The speech of the Greek flies, but the speech of the Roman sinks.
Aristophanes, by the vital and essential qualities of his humorous satire, is already more nearly our contemporary than Moliere; and even the Trouveres, careless and trivial as they mostly are, could fecundate a great poet like Chaucer, and are still delightful reading.
He saw the plays of Sophocles and Aristophanes; he walked amidst the friezes of Phidias and the paintings of Zeuxis: he knew by heart the choruses of Aeschylus: he heard the rhapsodist at the corner of the streets reciting the Shield of Achilles or the Death of Argus: he was a legislator, conversant with high questions of alliance, revenue, and war: he was a soldier, trained under a liberal and generous discipline: he was a judge compelled every day to weigh the effect of opposite arguments.
Aristophanes criticises Euripides severely as a perverter of Athenian morality. Aristotle mentions Euripides about twenty times in the Poetics, and frequently criticises him adversely, not, however, for his evil moral influence, but because he uses his choruses badly, and is faulty in character-drawing.
The Aetolians lost Amphipolis, and the Acarnanians Leucas, on account of their equivocal behaviour; whereas the Athenians, who continued to play the part of the begging poet in their own Aristophanes, not only obtained a gift of Delos and Lemnos, but were not ashamed even to petition for the deserted site of Haliartus, which was assigned to them accordingly.
But in the numerous addresses of Aristophanes to the spectators, even where he distinguishes them according to their respective ages and otherwise, we never observe any mention of spectatresses, and the poet would hardly have omitted the opportunity which this afforded him for some witticism or joke.
By Heracles, he said, what is this? here is Socrates always lying in wait for me, and always, as his way is, coming out at all sorts of unsuspected places: and now, what have you to say for yourself, and why are you lying here, where I perceive that you have contrived to find a place, not by a joker or lover of jokes, like Aristophanes, but by the fairest of the company?
Yet after all we are just as far away as ever from enabling the young actors at Harvard to give Aristophanes with all the true, subtle intonation and inflection of the Athens of 400 B.C. The instrument is dumb. Ingenuity has been shown also in the invention of "talking-machines," like Faber's, based on the reed organ pipe.
The path to the hills lies by way of little pools where the frogs have a croaking chorus that Aristophanes might have envied. On the approach of strange footsteps they hurry off the flat rocks by the pool, and one hears a musical plash as they reach water.
The whole aesthetic effect is limited by ethical presuppositions; and to outrage these is to defeat the very purpose of tragedy. Specially interesting in this connection are the strictures passed on Euripides in the passage of the Frogs of Aristophanes to which allusion has already been made. Euripides is there accused of lowering the tragic art by introducing what? Women in love!
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