One of the forms in which he is fondest of clothing his conceptions is
allegory; it may truly lie said that the stage of Aristophanes is a
series of caricatures where every idea has taken on a corporeal
presentment and is reproduced under human lineaments. To personify the
abstract notion, to dress it up in the shape of an animated being for its
better comprehension by the public, is in fact a proceeding altogether in
harmony with the customs and conventions of Ancient Comedy. The Comic
Poet never spares us a single detail of everyday life, no matter how
commonplace or degrading; he pushes the materialistic delineation of the
passions and vices to the extreme limit of obscene gesture and the most
cynical shamelessness of word and act.

This scorn of propriety, this unchecked licence of speech, has often been
made a subject of reproach against Aristophanes, and it appears to the
best modern critics that the poet would have been not a whit less
diverting or effective had he respected the dictates of common decency.
But it is only fair, surely, before finally condemning our Author, to
consider whether the times in which he lived, the origin itself of the
Greek Comedy, and the constitution of the audience, do not entitle him at
any rate to claim the benefit of extenuating circumstances. We must not
forget that Comedy owes its birth to those festivals at which Priapus was
adored side by side with Bacchus, and that 'Phallophoria' (carrying the
symbols of generation in procession) still existed as a religious rite at
the date when Aristophanes was composing his plays. Nor must we forget
that theatrical performances were at Athens forbidden pleasures to women
and children. Above all we should take full account of the code of social
custom and morality then prevailing. The Ancients never understood
modesty quite in the same way as our refined modern civilization does;
they spoke of everything without the smallest reticence, and expressions
which would revolt the least squeamish amongst ourselves did not surprise