with a play in which the poet deserts his wife Comedy to go whoring after boys called Wine-bottles and a slut
called Drunkenness. In that year's competition, Cratinus came first, and the Clouds of Aristophanes came second.
Since it was in the Clouds that Aristophanes attacked Socrates, one may hope that Socrates took it in the same
spirit as Cratinus. We are told that the basic conception of plays was Cratinus' strong point. There is little to add
except his vigorous obscenity, compared to which Aristophanes was a pale -writer, and his uninhibited attacks on
Pericles and his mistress Aspasia. It is probably true that vigour and obscenity and personal invective declined as
the century wore out, though we shall see there are some exceptions.
The nearest contemporaries to Aristophanes in his working lifetime were Eupolis, who started producing comedies
in 429 BC and died young in the course of the war, by drowning at sea, and a comic poet called Plato, younger
than either of them, at work from about 410 to some time after 390. Eupolis presented Dionysus in the armed
forces, subject to tough discipline, and in the Towns of Attica a scheme that was both solemn and humorous, and
had a huge influence on Aristophanes' Frogs. In the competitive theatre of those years, it was inevitable that each
year's plays, thirsting for an original idea, should often find it in last year's successes. Aristophanes and Eupolis
shared some targets, and Aristophanes had already denounced Eupolis for plagiarism. In the Towns of Attica dead
Athenians in the underworld argue about who should be sent back from the dead to put Athens in order; the Towns
of Attica seem to be the chorus. In the Frogs the dispute is only over putting the tragic theatre in order.
The Frogs embodies a feature of comedy that is somewhat hard to explain: its parodying of tragedies, sometimes
too self-consciously, as if comedy has to be a poor cousin of tragedy. Well, perhaps it was so. It is also true that the
audience was the same for both, and the festivals came to be the same. Comedy was founded on mockery, and the
stage mocked itself. But of all the elements in comic verse that meant most to an ancient audience, the one that
most seldom amuses us now is the parody of tragedy - with the shining exception of the Frogs, which can be very
funny indeed.
Aristophanes
In the course of his career, Aristophanes spans the first two of the three phases or styles of Greek comedy. We
must leave Epicharmus in Sicily out of account; Sicily and Athens in his day were separate planets. But starting in
the twenties with vigorous and farcical burlesque, intermingled with savage onslaughts on politicians, he moved
through the sadder, and in places more solemn, schemes of comedies such as the Frogs (405 B.C.) to the revival of
comedy after the fall of Athens. If we believe that tragedy never did flower again, that may be because the fall of
the city coincided with the deaths of Euripides and Sophocles, at about eighty and ninety years old. Comedy did
reflower, perhaps because Aristophanes and the comic poet Plato survived.
Of the plays we have, the very first is like a bucket of cold water in the face. It not only sounds, it trumpets the
great themes of comic poetry: sex, life on the farm, the good old days, the nightmare of politics, the oddities of
religion, the strange manners of the town. It is called the Acharnians (425 B.C.). The Knights, in the next year,
adds to the old mixture some stern moralizing, some furious invective, and some lyrical patriotic politics. The
quarrel with Cleon had begun earlier, in a severe onslaught in 426, in the Babylonians, Aristophanes' second play,
which alas has not survived. Cleon was the leader of those who had wanted a year earlier to massacre the people of
Mytilene, and he nearly brought that off. Aristophanes in the Babylonians showed cities of the Athenian League as
slaves grinding at the mill.
We cannot avoid taking an interest in Aristophanes' attitude to slavery. Laughter without pity probably does not
exist, but Aristophanes certainly introduces comic slaves. Yet racial comedy is not involved, because anyone could
get enslaved, and it is noticeable that he shows his slaves with humanity, and with no more indignity than other