GREEK TRAGEDY AND COMEDY, according to Aristotle, developed side by side, and the Gargantuan Aristophanes (ca. 450-ca.380 B.C.) was the first great son of Thalia. This paradoxical figure, who laughed at all things and apparently respected but few, has been attacked as an aristocrat who scorned hoi polloi and derided democracy. But the democracy under which he lived was in decay and the larger part of his life was passed in wartime. Most of his great comedies were written before the rise of the Thirty Tyrants and while the poet was comparatively young-- The Acharnians, The Knights, The Clouds, The Wasps, Peace, The Birds, Lysistrata. With the change to a middle or transitional period in Athenian comedy, Aristophanes made life theatrically wretched for the tyrant Cleon by lampooning him. It has been said that his lampooning of Socrates led to the philosopher's condemnation and death ( 399), but this view is an exaggeration refuted by the fact that Socrates himself laughed at his public effigy. And the three famous attacks on Euripides in The Acharnians, Thesmophoriazisae and The Frogs are certainly tinged with the regard that makes true satire the highest form of flattery. Lastly, some of the grandest characters in Aristophanes are the peasants and insignificant citizens who wish to know what's wrong with Athens and the world, and who attempt comically heroic expeditions, challenging even Zeus.
The poet was, if anything, an aristocrat of the intellect; he was also the first professional literary man in Greece, occupying very much the position Ben Jonson did in Elizabethan England. There can be no comparison between Aristophanes and later masters of the comic muse--excepting only Rabelais, Shikespeare, and Molière. Molière's laughter is usually a laughter of the quiet mind and Shakespeare's of the generous heart. It is only in Rabelais that we get the continuous laughter of the whole body. But the priest was not the poet the poet was. Aristophanes' laughter is the laughter of dancing, the unleashed revelry of the Dionysian grape, the gaiety of "the light fantastic." There is nothing too bawdy, nothing too absurd, nothing too incredible for the Athenian--and nothing too delicate or beautiful. His plays contain some of the most exquisite lyrics ever penned. And there was nothing too sacred--with the possible exception of art. His regard for Aeschylus is testimony of that one reverence. Of the follies of Athenian society, the degradation of the democracy, the chicaneries and villainies of despots, and their disregard for common justice and the common laws, and especially the defilement of peace, Aristophanes, like Euripides, had felt enough to raise his voice in protest and poetry. Where Euripides' genius pursued the tragic or tragi-comic road, Aristophanes pursued the purely comic. Behind his Comus, however, there was a daemon as earnest and ethical as the one which bedeviled the founder of a democratic liberalism. The young aristocrat learned the initial steps of his art from his unsociable elder and never really parted with the lampooned Euripides.
Aristophanes has also been accused of stripping
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