characters. What he really hates, apart from such scum of the earth as Cleon, is charlatans and pretentiousness and
pseudo-reform. But he differs from modern satiric writers in having a strong and passionately held moral standard,
rooted in a society that he profoundly loves. Also, of course, in being a poet, perhaps a great poet, with a mind as
open as daylight. Combine all these contradictions together and add a comic genius, and you -will have
Aristophanes, but only in the fifth century. What went to produce him is so many elements, so highly specific, they
can never again be repeated. The most important is direct democracy in a traditional society.
His early comedies were political, his latest began to be social. In the second phase of Athenian comedy, to which
Aristophanes is virtually our only witness, the chorus withered away to some musical interludes, plot knitted
together into coherence, and a kind of realism took over. The early plots had been as wild as English pantomimes
used to be. They were terribly spirited. The society they showed was diverse and in numerous ways eccentric: the
overlap of generations, given the speed of change at that time, and the intermingling of types when Athens was
under siege, produced plenty of paradoxes and comic fireworks. But in the fourth century something smoother,
more like a bourgeoisie, began to emerge. It was mirrored, not very kindly, in the comic theatre. It was bourgeois
in its morality, in its limited views of things, in its tastes and ambitions. No doubt such people can be justified by
history. Aristophanes would not have liked them, nor would his Acharnian peasant. His Wealth (388 B.C.) reflects
only the transition. What was coming was comedy as the modern world has known it, beginning with Menander.
As an imaginative artist, Aristophanes was fully developed by the end of the twenties, and already in Peace (421)
he was driven to wild fantasies to express his longing for war to end. In 414 the heroes of the Birds are two
Athenians who despair of the city altogether. He makes the point lightly, but make it he does.
We're flying away from home with both our feet,
not that we hate that city, not at all,
that great city happy by nature
and general provider for all men.
But the crickets sit singing on the branches
for one or two months; Athens does it for ever,
singing away their lives in the law courts.Life at Athens being no longer worth living, they go to consult a mythical hero who was turned into a bird. The
plot of the play is the building of the city of the birds. One of its chief pleasures is a very long aria, a long lyric
poem in a series of attractive metres sung by one character, the hoopoe, who calls the other birds with some bird-
mimicry such as possibly a bird-snarer might use. Apart from the Wasps, who are melodious in Vaughan Williams
but less so in Aristophanes, this is the first animal chorus we have from Aristophanes. The bird mimicry is
remarkable. It is untranslatable, of course, because a lot of it depends on onomatopoeic words in Greek. For gaiety
and lightness of touch, Aristophanes perhaps never outdid that scene.
The birds set up a blockade to cut off sacrifices from earth to the gods. The play ends as comedies were supposed
to end, with a celebration. The gods make peace with the birds and mankind, and we have a marriage hymn with
prayers to Zeus, shouts of victory, and the play disappearing in a shower of fireworks. At the festival of that year,
the winning play was called the Revellers, this was second, and the third was called the Solitary; it was another
escapist play. The Birds is crammed with comic inventions, including Prometheus hiding under an umbrella from
the other gods, Iris captured in mid air by the birds, a Thracian god of extreme barbarity, and a poet who wants to
be turned into a nightingale.
For a really funny play by modern standards we can turn to 411 BC, to the Lysistrata.' By this time Aristophanes'