do him honour. If such liberties might be taken with the Gods, mortals were not likely to escape. It was on the comic stage that democracy indulged in the most unbounded freedom, allowing any citizen, rich or poor, high or low, to be attacked and assailed, either in his public or private character, with impunity. Unlike the Tragic and Satyric drama, which took their plots generally from legends of olden time, Comedy chose for her subjects the topics and events of everyday life, the actions and characters of people who were familiarly known to the audience. And not only did she hold up to ridicule the vices and follies of private life, but even the conduct of public men and their acts of administration. Those statesmen to whom the poet was opposed in politics fell chiefly under his lash, as might be expected. His animadversions were an extraordinary admixture of truth and seriousness with scurrility and absurdity. In short, the comedian was the great censor and satirist of the day, uniting in himself the functions of the pantomimic droll, the fool of the Middle Ages, the journal and Charivari of our own time. Democracy herself was not safe from the assaults of her indulged children. In the Demus of Aristophanes the Athenian people were amused to behold an impersonation of themselves. And what wonder? If Bacchus could endure to be laughed at upon his own stage, why should his votaries be more particular? That the leading politicians of Athens occasionally winced under the castigations of the comedian, is not to be doubted. Pericles himself, with all his integrity and magnanimity, must have keenly felt the stinging blows of Cratinus. We know that Cleon was greatly exasperated by the Babylonians of Aristophanes; who however was not deterred from bringing him on the stage yet more offensively in his play of the Knights. In the year B. C. 440, when Pericles was at the height of his power, a law was passed to prohibit comic performance; but this after two or three years was repealed. One or two more attempts were made to restrain it, but did not succeed. With the exception of a short period during the interregnum of B. C. 411, the Old Comedy continued in the exercise of its full liberty until the close of the Peloponnesian war. After the expulsion of the Thirty Tyrants, however, it was replaced by one of a less licentious kind, which has received the name of the Middle Comedy, because it was a transition from the coarseness of an early age to the refinement of a later. The spirit of the Athenian people did not then seek the wild excitement, or tolerate the intemperate freedom, of the days of Pericles: and the comedian, instead of bringing public characters upon the stage and indulging in gross and open personalities, contented himself with a more disguised censorship, with satire of a more general nature, with literary criticism and parody. There was no lack of poets under this regime. Athenæus tells us (viii. 336.) that he had read upwards of eight hundred plays of the Middle Comedy. The most celebrated writers of it were Antiphanes and Alexis. It lasted till the overthrow of Athenian independence at Charonea. To this succeeded the New Comedy, which, quitting entirely the regions of personal satire and caricature, applied itself (like that of the present day) to the invention of amusing plots, in which nature and real life were imitated, but the persons and the incidents were always fictitious. Between such plays and the Aristophanic there is a much greater difference than between genteel comedy and farce. The principal comedians of this last period, which lasted less than a century, were Menander, Philemon, and Diphilus. Fragments of them only remain: but we can form a good idea of their style from the plays of Plautus and Terence, especially those of the latter, which are translations of Menander. Horace, who disliked anything approaching to broad farce or scurrility, condemns the licentiousness of the Aristophanic drama, while he applauds the talents and vigour of the writers. Thus, Satire I. 4. 1.— Eupolis atque Cratinus Aristophanesque poetæ, Ars Poetica, 281. Successit vetus his Comoedia, non sine multâ To discuss the merits and demerits of Aristophanes and his contemporaries would lead us too far; but we may take a glance at what Mitchell says upon the matter in the preliminary discourse to his translation: "The Old Comedy, as it is called, in contradistinction to what was afterwards named the Middle and the New, stood in the extreme relation of contrariety and parody to the tragedy of the Greeks-it was directed chiefly to the lower orders of society at Athens; it served in some measure the purposes of the modern journal, in which public measures and the topics of the day might be fully discussed; and in consequence the dramatic persone were generally the poet's own contemporaries, speaking in their own names and acting in masks, which, as they bore only a caricature resemblance of their own faces, showed that the poet, in his observations upon them, did not mean to be taken literally to his expression. Like tragedy, it constituted part of a religious ceremony; and the character of the Deity to whom it was more particularly dedicated was stamped at times pretty visibly upon the work which was composed in his honour. The Dionysian festivals were the great carnivals of antiquity—they celebrated the returns of vernal festivity or the joyous vintage, and were in consequence the great holidays of Athens-the seasons of universal relaxation. The comic poet was the high priest of the fes tival; and if the orgies of his Divinity (the God of wine) sometimes demanded a style of poetry which a Father of our Church probably had in his eye when he called all poetry the devil's wine, the organ of their utterance (however strange it may seem to us) no doubt considered himself as perfectly absolved from the censure which we should bestow on such productions: in their composition he was discharging the same pious office as the painter, whose duty it was to fill the temples of the same Deity with pictures which our imaginations would consider equally ill-suited to the habitations of Divinity. What religion therefore forbids among us, the religion of the Greeks did not merely tolerate, but enjoin. Nor was the extreme and even profane gaiety of the Old Comedy without its excuse. To unite extravagant mirth with a solemn seriousness was enjoined by law even in the sacred festival of Ceres. The feast of Bacchus retained the licence without the embarrassment of the restraint. While the philosophers therefore querulously maintained that man was the joke and plaything of the Gods, the comic poet reversed the picture, and made the Gods the plaything of men: in his hands indeed everything was upon the broad grin; the Gods laughed, men laughed, animals laughed. Nature was considered as a sort of fantastic being, with a turn for the humorous, and the world was treated as a sort of extended jest-book, where the poet pointed out the bon-mots, and acted in some degree as corrector of the press. If he discharged this office sometimes in the sarcastic spirit of a Mephistophiles, this too was considered as part of his functions. He was the Terræ Filius of the day, and lenity would have been considered not as an act of discretion, but as a cowardly dereliction of duty. "Of the species of comedy thus described, whoever was the inventor, whether Epicharmus or Phormis, Aristophanes was the great finisher and perfecter. With an ear tuned to the nicest modulations of harmony, and with a temperament apparently most joyous and joyful, he was just fitted for the entertainment of a people, of whom Philip of Macedon, when he compared them to the Hermaic statues so common in their streets, drew in a few words one of the most happy and characteristic descriptions of a people which is upon record. That gaiety which is so well adapted to a nation of quick natural parts, and which has so few charms for persons of cultivated understandings, the gaiety which consists in painting pleasantly the dulness of the understanding (la bétise) and in inspiring buffoonery; of that gaiety, which has been made equally the basis of Italian and Grecian comedy, Aristophanes was preeminently the master. Music, dancing, metre, decoration-all that union of amusement which the Greeks, a seeing and not a reading public, (this fact cannot be too much in our minds when we are talking of their dramatic literature,) required of their writers for the stage-Aristophanes seemed to have improved: the Muse of comedy herself he left as he found her, a beautiful Titania, matchless in her outward proportions, but with a spell upon her affections, and showering favours, which should have been better bestowed, upon an ass's head with Bottom the weaver below it." It remains only to give an account of the theatre itself and its arrangements. For a long time a wooden theatre, erected only for the time of the festival, was sufficient for the Athenian drama. At length in the year B.C. 500, when Eschylus exhibited his first tragedy, the building overloaded with spectators broke down. It was then resolved to build a theatre of stone. The rock of the Acropolis was made use of for that purpose. Under its southern wall, at the eastern extremity, tiers of seats rising one above another were scooped into the rock. Each tier formed a large segment of a circle, the diameter increasing with the ascent. These tiers of seats, with stairs and passages for convenient access, formed that portion of the theatre which was occupied by the spectators, and was, according to a less comprehensive meaning of the term, called the theatre. The circular area in the centre, which lay a little below the lowest tier of benches, was called the Orchestra. It was the floor upen which the chorus performed their dances, and for that purpose was covered over with smooth boards. In the centre was the altar of Bacchus, called Thymele, which reminded people of the ancient times, when the dithyramb was performed in a ring round the altar; though now its principal use was as a platform for musicians and a prompter to stand upon. The stage (Proscenium) was outside of the orchestra, forming the remainder of the circle of which the orchestra was a segment. It was elevated a little above it. The background was terminated by the Scena, the wall or frame upon which the scenery of the drama was delineated, and which, by the rolling of a curtain underground (not pulling up, as with us), was exhibited to the spectators. With the exception of a covered portico over the highest tier of seats, the whole of this theatre was open to the sky. The acoustic arrangements are said to have been skilfully contrived. The actors entered upon the stage through the Scena by three different doors, assigned to the different characters. The chorus advanced into the orchestra by side passages, in files three or five deep, and arranged themselves so as to be in readiness for the choral performance: the Coryphæus or leader, who was one of the dramatis personæ, taking a station not far from the Thymele, from which he could carry on his part of the dialogue. Although we, in reading Athenian tragedies at the present day, are apt to regard the choral parts with less interest than the dramatic, especially those dithyrambic-like effusions which have little or nothing to do with the plot, and although even at Athens the chorus under Eschylus and his successors had come to hold a comparatively subordinate place in the drama, yet it still possessed a great charm for the Athenian audience, and indeed one fully equal to the drama itself. Independently of its religious associations, the song of the chorus was accompanied with music and dancing, both of an elaborate composition. The instruments were the harp and the flute. The dance was complicated: Attic tragedians had adopted the antistrophic form of Stesichorus: and, to guide the dancers in their evolutions, lines were marked on the boarded floor of the orchestra. The difference between the styles of tragic and comic dancing was as great as that between tragedy and comedy themselves. The former (called Emmeleia) was stately and graceful; the latter (Chordax) was ludicrous and indecent. While the tragic chorus consisted usually of fifteen, the comic were four-and-twenty. To train these choristers was by no means the least expensive part of bringing out a play. The poet had to apply for a chorus to the Archon, and the cost was defrayed (as we have seen) by the Choragus. In the middle comedy the chorus after a time was altogether omitted. The wearing of masks by the actors has been already alluded to. This practice, which was originally derived from the rude disguises of the mummers, was afterwards. continued as a matter of necessity, on account of the size of the theatre, which made it impossible for the majority of the spectators to distinguish the natural features. A mask which enlarged the face remedied this defect. In tragedy there was an additional reason for adopting the disguise. Its principal characters were the Gods and Heroes of the ancient legends, whom it would hardly have seemed proper to represent on the stage like ordinary human beings. As the cothurnus elevated the person of the actor, so the mask gave a superhuman expression to his countenance. No little skill was applied to the fashioning this important part of the dramatic costume, and we have seen that Eschylus himself was the author of improvements in it. The manufacture of masks became a business each character, as Apollo, Achilles, a Youth, a Maiden, &c., had its appropriate mask, which was easily recognized by the people. There was not the same necessity for disguising the chorus, who were nearer to the spectators, and were arrayed for dancing rather than for acting: they therefore generally appeared without masks. : In the old comedy the masks were often extremely grotesque and absurd, just as they are in an English pantomime; though for ordinary personages they were tolerably faithful to life. And instead of the dignified cothurnus, the soccus, or slipper of common life, was used to tread the stage with. Where characters of the day were introduced, it was desirable to have as good a likeness as possible, either by way of caricature or otherwise. It is said that, when Aristophanes was about to exhibit Cleon upon the stage, no artist dared to make his mask, and no actor would undertake to play the character; the poet was obliged to perform it himself, and rubbed lees of wine upon his face, to imitate the flushed and bloated countenance of the demagogue. The exact dimensions of the Attic theatre (which was never quite |