ARISTOPHANES. Modern comedy de rives by way of Plautus, Terence, and Moliere from the so-called New Comedy of Menander and his contemporaries. The so-called old com edy, of which Aristophanes is the only surviv ing representative, flourished 100 years earlier at the time of that Peloponnesian War which shook Greek civilization as the European War shakes that of Europe. There is no good single modern analogue of the old comedy. It is a blend of Shakespeare's (Midsummer Night's Dream) with Bernard Shaw, musical comedy and a revue de fin d'annee. It is extravaganza combined with the dramatic criticism of ideas and set off with occasional flights of true po etry and wood notes wild. So at least it ap pears in Aristophanes, who in native genius and spontaneous mastery of expression ranks with the four or five supreme poets of Greece. Though Aristophanes was easily the foremost representative of the old comedy, the extant fragments of his contemporaries, Eupolis, Cra tinus and others, indicate that he found this comedy an already established literary form. It was presumably, like everything else in the world, an evolution. The performance of com edies at the winter and spring festivals of the wine god Dionysus (the Lena and the Greater Dionysia5 was for the Athenians a ceremony of the state religion. But modern attempts to trace the processes of the origin of comedy in primitive rites, revels and superstitions, and its development in imitation of tragedy are, in the absence of evidence, merely conjecture masking as science. They distract our atten tion from the broadly human literary aspects of that comedy and throw into false perspective the life, thought, politics and civilization of Periclean Athens, which were its real shaping environment.
Apart from his 11 extant plays little is known of Aristophanes' life. His first play, the lost (Banqueters,) was produced in the year 427, like other of the earlier plays under the name of another comedian because, as Aristophanes tells us, in The Clouds' and in The Wasps) he was still too young to woo public favor in his own name. Whether this is literally and historically true or not it im plies that he was a young man in 427 and may have been born between 448 and 455. His last
extant play dates from 388 and he is supposed to have died between 385 and 375. An obscure jest in his (Knights) implies that he was in i some way connected with the island of 2Egina, recently conquered by Athens — possibly be cause his father held an allotment of land there. The praise of country life and the pictures of rustic types in his plays indicate familiarity with the rural life of Attica and perhaps sym pathy with the sturdy farming class, the back bone of sane, conservative democracy. But until the seige penned them within the long walls many Athenian families lived by preference on their country estates, and we need not assume that the lover of the country was himself a farmer or a bidder for the farmer's vote. In any case, Aristophanes is no less familiar with the city and the life and gossip of the young bloods about town. Plato in the (Symposium' depicts him as dining with Agathon and in the company of that Socrates whom he had lam pooned in his (Clouds.) His criticism of life and that of the old comedy generally is on the whole conservative, with many lapses into irresponsible and in consistent buffoonery. He satirizes in strangely modern style the new thought, the new educa tion, the new music, the new poetry, the new liberal theology, the new radical democracy and its demagogues. Modern critics, in reac tion against naive older interpretations, warn us not to take too seriously the criticism of life of one whose main purpose was to make the people laugh. The psychology of the possible mixture of motives is ingeruously analyzed in Browning's