thousand miles here from the kind of argument he deals with.
It is a pity we have no complete satyr play by Aeschylus. The fragments of his Net-Fishers, in which the satyrs fish
up Danae and the baby Perseus, are very promising. It is hard to reconstruct the plot, but the characters include a
king's brother called Net, and an old man of the island, possibly a god, just possibly the old Silenus, father of the
satyrs, who will have owned the physical net and claimed what it netted. The island is Seriphos, and the character
called Net is a traditional element in the story, which originally had no satyrs in it. He was the fisherman, and
Aeschylus adopted him. The pleasantest surviving passage is a lyric fragment where the satyrs entice the child:
'Come along darling' (they use a Doric diminutive). There follows a whole line of that 'popopopo' noise which is
still part of the Greek repertory of sounds. 'Come along quick to the children. Come nicely to my nursing hands,
my dear. You will have -weasels to play with and fawns and baby hedgehogs, and sleep in the same bed as your
mother and father.' These words are not as innocent as they appear: Silenus appoints himself as father without
consulting Danae. We know from another line that the baby was amazed by the erection which was part of a satyr's
stage dress. 'What a cocklover the little fellow is', says the satyr. Unfortunately there is little more to be done with
the fragments of this play; we must just hope that one day the goddess of papyri is merciful and we get the rest of it.
Comedy
Introduction
The main surviving mass of ancient Greek comedy begins only with Aristophanes, who was born within a few
years of the mid fifth century, long after the great tragedians and too late to tell us much about the riotous early
days of the comic chorus, before the state took it over. The consolation of this is the youth and zest of his work in
the twenties of the century, and the fact that he worked on with great originality until 388 B.C. In the early plays of
Aristophanes, traditional Athenian comedy, the Old Style, as it came to be called, had already reached its full
development; it has, as Aristotle remarked of tragedy, 'attained its nature'. The chorus was all-important, and the
revelation of its dress and dances and music as the Wasps or the Wine-bottles or the Clouds or the Caterpillars was
central to the competition. Not all the choruses were animal or even precisely humorous. The Knights and the
Towns of Attica will not have been played entirely for laughs.
The comic theatre in the fifth century was directly political in a way that tragedy was not; its jokes had a bite and
were often meant to be taken seriously. Aristophanes used his chorus at a certain moment in the play to address the
audience directly; sometimes the chorus itself, the Birds or Clouds or Wasps or Frogs or whatever, seems to be
speaking to us, sometimes the poet himself speaks through them. The connection of the Athenian political theatre
with direct democracy is obvious. Its imaginative devices are bold and its characters are very plain-spoken. The
Aristophanes who speaks in Plato's Symposium is surely very close to the real man, but the same cannot be said
for the Socrates in Aristophanes' Clouds. The style of parody of individuals in the theatre is simple, vivid, and full
of glee. It is not naturalistic.
All the same, real Athenians could be parodied by name or mostly thinly disguised, and plays could even be named
after them. We know that the politicians resented this, which is hardly surprising, but there is no evidence that they
ever managed to stamp it out under the fifth-century democracy. Maybe laughter really is like the crackling of
thorns under a pot: hard to stamp out, and kicking only scatters it. Aristophanes attacks with joyful accuracy
anyone and anything that strikes his fancy. As for his own political views, clearly enough they were democratic
and patriotic. He was devoted to the Athenian democracy, and even more so to the comic theatre, perhaps the most
characteristic of all its institutions. It was never a 'theatre of the common man'; it was nothing so safe. It was alive,
part of a real democracy.