7.  THE GREEK COMEDY IS REDUCED ONLY TO ARISTOPHANES.

Not to go too far out of our way, let us return to Aristophanes, the only poet, in whom we can now find the Greek comedy.  He is the single writer whom the violence of time has, in some degree, spared, after having buried in darkness, and almost in forgetfulness, so many great men, of whom we have nothing but the names and a few fragments, and such slight memorials, as are scarcely sufficient to defend them against the enemies of the honour of antiquity; yet these memorials are like the last glimmer of the setting sun, which scarce affords us a weak and fading light; yet from this glimmer we must endeavour to collect rays of sufficient strength to form a picture of the Greek comedy, approaching as near as possible to the truth.

Of the personal character of Aristophanes little is known; what account we can give of it must, therefore, be had from his comedies.  It can scarcely be said, with certainty, of what country he was:  the invectives of his enemies so often called in question his qualification as a citizen, that they have made it doubtful.  Some said, he was of Rhodes, others of Egina, a little island in the neighbourhood, and all agreed that he was a stranger.  As to himself, he said, that he was the son of Philip, and born in the Cydathenian quarter; but he confessed, that some of his fortune was in Egina, which was, probably, the original seat of his family.  He was, however, formally declared a citizen of Athens, upon evidence, whether good or bad, upon a decisive judgment, and this for having made his judges merry by an application of a saying of Telemachus[22], of which this is the sense:  “I am, as my mother tells me, the son of Philip:  for my own part, I know little of the matter; for what child knows his own father?” This piece of merriment did him as much good, as Archias received from the oration of Cicero[23], who said that that poet was a Roman citizen.  An honour which, if he had not inherited by birth, he deserved for his genius.

Aristophanes[24] flourished in the age of the great men of Greece, particularly of Socrates and Euripides, both of whom he outlived.  He made a great figure during the whole Peloponnesian war, not merely as a comick poet, by whom the people were diverted, but as the censor of the government, as a man kept in pay by the state to reform it, and almost to act the part of the arbitrator of the publick[25].  A particular account of his comedies will best let us into his personal character as a poet, and into the nature of his genius, which is what we are most interested to know.  It will, however, not be amiss to prepossess our readers a little by the judgments that have been passed upon him by the criticks of our own time, without forgetting one of the ancients that deserves great respect.

 8.  ARISTOPHANES CENSURED AND PRAISED.