“Of fifty nymphs Copaic alderliefest queen,”

and then, his voice breaking with the intolerable pathos of Admetus’s farewell to the dying Alcestis, added,

                    “Yea, even in death
     Thou’lt bide with me, embalmed and beet-bestewed”?

Did they recognize the blasphemous Pindaric pun in “Helle’s holy straits,” for a tight place, and appreciate all the niceties of diction, metre, and dramatic art discriminated in the comparison between Aeschylus and Euripides in the ‘Frogs’?  At any rate, no Athenian could miss the fun of Dicaeopolis (like Hector’s baby) “scared at the dazzling plume and nodding crest” of the swashbuckler Lamachus, of Philocleon, clinging to his ass’s belly like Odysseus escaping under the ram from the Cyclops’s cave; of the baby in the Thesmophoriazusae seized as a Euripidean hostage, and turning out a wine bottle in swaddling-clothes; of light-foot Iris in the role of a saucy, frightened soubrette; of the heaven-defying AEschylean Prometheus hiding under an umbrella from the thunderbolts of Zeus.  And they must have felt instinctively what only a laborious erudition reveals to us, the sudden subtle modulations of the colloquial comic verse into mock-heroic travesty of high tragedy or lyric.

Euripides, the chief victim of Aristophanes’s genius for parody, was so burlesqued that his best known lines became by-words, and his most ardent admirers, the very Balaustions and Euthukleses, must have grinned when they heard them, like a pair of augurs.  If we conceive five or six Shakespearean comedies filled from end to end with ancient Pistols hallooing to “pampered jades of Asia,” and Dr. Caiuses chanting of “a thousand vagrom posies,” we may form some idea of Aristophanes’s handling of the notorious lines—­

     “The tongue has sworn, the mind remains unsworn.” 
     “Thou lovest life, thy sire loves it too.” 
     “Who knows if life and death be truly one?”

But the charm of Aristophanes does not lie in any of these things singly, but in the combination of ingenious and paradoxical fancy with an inexhaustible flow of apt language by which they are held up and borne out.  His personages are ready to make believe anything.  Nothing surprises them long.  They enter into the spirit of each new conceit, and can always discover fresh analogies to bear it out.  The very plots of his plays are realized metaphors or embodied conceits.  And the same concrete vividness of imagination is displayed in single scenes and episodes.  The Better and the Worse Reason plead the causes of the old and new education in person.  Cleon and Brasidas are the pestles with which War proposes to bray Greece in a mortar; the triremes of Athens in council assembled declare that they will rot in the docks sooner than yield their virginity to musty, fusty Hyperbolus.  The fair cities of Greece stand about waiting for the recovery of Peace from her Well, with dreadful black eyes, poor things; Armisticia and Harvest-Home tread the stage in the flesh, and Nincompoop and Defraudation are among the gods.