of the day with which it abounded) of the modern pantomime. But it was
something more, and more important to the Athenian public than any or all
of these could have been. Almost always more or less political, and
sometimes intensely personal, and always with some purpose more or less
important underlying its wildest vagaries and coarsest buffooneries, it
supplied the place of the political journal, the literary review, the
popular caricature and the party pamphlet, of our own times. It combined
the attractions and influence of all these; for its grotesque masks and
elaborate 'spectacle' addressed the eye as strongly as the author's
keenest witticisms did the ear of his audience."[1]

Rollicking, reckless, uproarious fun is the key-note; though a more
serious intention is always latent underneath. Aristophanes was a
strong--sometimes an unscrupulous--partisan; he was an uncompromising
Conservative of the old school, an ardent admirer of the vanishing
aristocratic régime, an anti-Imperialist--'Imperialism' was a
_democratic_ craze at Athens--and never lost an opportunity of throwing
scorn on Cleon the demagogue, his political _bête noïre_ and personal
enemy, Cleon's henchmen of the popular faction, and the War party
generally. Gravity, solemnity, seriousness, are conspicuous by their
absence; even that 'restraint' which is the salient characteristic of
Greek expression in literature no less than in Art, is largely relaxed in
the rough-and-tumble, informal, miscellaneous _modern_ phantasmagoria of
these diverting extravaganzas.

At the same time we must not be misled by the word 'Comedy' to bring
Aristophanes' work into comparison with what we call Comedy now. This is
quite another thing--confined to a representation of incidents of
private, generally polite life, and made up of the intrigues and
entanglements of social and domestic situations. Such a Comedy the Greeks