But Aristophanes’s ideas interest us less than his art and humor.  We have seen the nature of his plots.  In such a topsy-turvy world there is little opportunity for nice delineation of character.  His personages are mainly symbols or caricatures.  Yet they are vividly if broadly sketched, and genuine touches of human nature lend verisimilitude to their most improbable actions.  One or two traditional comic types appear for the first time, apparently, on his stage:  the alternately cringing and familiar slave or valet of comedy, in his Xanthias and Karion; and in Dicaeopolis, Strepsiades, Demos, Trygaeus, and Dionysus, the sensual, jovial, shrewd, yet naive and credulous middle-aged bourgeois gentilhomme or ‘Sganarelle,’ who is not ashamed to avow his poltroonery, and yet can, on occasion, maintain his rights with sturdy independence.

But the chief attraction of Aristophanes is the abounding comic force and verve of his style.  It resembles an impetuous torrent, whose swift rush purifies in its flow the grossness and obscenity inseparable from the origin of comedy, and buoys up and sweeps along on the current of fancy and improvisation the chaff and dross of vulgar jests, puns, scurrilous personalities, and cheap “gags,” allowing no time for chilling reflections or criticism.  Jests which are singly feeble combine to induce a mood of extravagant hilarity when huddled upon us with such “impossible conveyance.”  This vivida vis animi can hardly be reproduced in a translation, and disappears altogether in an attempt at an abstract enumeration of the poet’s inexhaustible devices for comic effect.  He himself repeatedly boasts of the fertility of his invention, and claims to have discarded the coarse farce of his predecessors for something more worthy of the refined intelligence of his clever audience.  Yet it must be acknowledged that much even of his wit is the mere filth-throwing of a naughty boy; or at best the underbred jocularity of the “funny column,” the topical song, or the minstrel show.  There are puns on the names of notable personages; a grotesque, fantastic, punning fauna, flora, and geography of Greece; a constant succession of surprises effected by the sudden substitution of low or incongruous terms in proverbs, quotations, and legal or religious formulas; scenes in dialect, scenes of excellent fooling in the vein of Uncle Toby and the Clown, girds at the audience, personalities that for us have lost their point,—­about Cleonymus the caster-away of shields, or Euripides’s herb-selling mother,—­and everywhere unstinted service to the great gods Priapus and Cloacina.

A finer instrument of comic effect is the parody.  The countless parodies of the lyric and dramatic literature of Greece are perhaps the most remarkable testimony extant to the intelligence of an Athenian audience.  Did they infallibly catch the allusion when Dicaeopolis welcomed back to the Athenian fish-market the long-lost Copaic eel in high AEschylean strain,—­