The ‘Plutus,’ B.C. 388:  a second and much altered edition of a play represented for the first time in 408.  With the ‘Ecclesiazusae’ it marks the transition to the Middle Comedy, there being no parabasis, and little of the exuberant verve of the older pieces.  The blind god of Wealth recovers his eyesight by sleeping in the temple of AEsculapius, and proceeds to distribute the gifts of fortune more equitably.

The assignment of the dates and restoration of the plots of the thirty-two lost plays, of which a few not very interesting fragments remain, belong to the domain of conjectural erudition.

Aristophanes has been regarded by some critics as a grave moral censor, veiling his high purpose behind the grinning mask of comedy; by others as a buffoon of genius, whose only object was to raise a laugh.  Both sides of the question are ingeniously and copiously argued in Browning’s ‘Aristophanes’ Apology’; and there is a judicious summing up of the case of Aristophanes vs.  Euripides in Professor Jebb’s lectures on Greek poetry.  The soberer view seems to be that while predominantly a comic artist, obeying the instincts of his genius, he did frequently make his comedy the vehicle of an earnest conservative polemic against the new spirit of the age in Literature, Philosophy, and Politics.  He pursued Euripides with relentless ridicule because his dramatic motives lent themselves to parody, and his lines were on the lips of every theatre-goer; but also because he believed that Euripides had spoiled the old, stately, heroic art of Aeschylus and Sophocles by incongruous infusions of realism and sentimentalism, and had debased the “large utterance of the early gods” by an unhallowed mixture of colloquialism, dialectic, and chicane.

Aristophanes travestied the teachings of Socrates because his ungainly figure, and the oddity (atopia) attributed to him even by Plato, made him an excellent butt; yet also because he felt strongly that it was better for the young Athenian to spend his days in the Palaestra, or “where the elm-tree whispers to the plane,” than in filing a contentious tongue on barren logomachies.  That Socrates in fact discussed only ethical problems, and disclaimed all sympathy with speculations about things above our heads, made no difference:  he was the best human embodiment of a hateful educational error.  And similarly the assault upon Cleon, the “pun-pelleting of demagogues from Pnux,” was partly due to the young aristocrat’s instinctive aversion to the coarse popular leader, and to the broad mark which the latter presented to the shafts of satire, but equally, perhaps, to a genuine patriotic revolt at the degradation of Athenian politics in the hands of the successors of Pericles.