The special metaphor or conceit of each play attracts appropriate words and images, and creates a distinct atmosphere of its own.  In the ‘Knights’ the air fairly reeks with the smell of leather and the tanyard.  The ‘Birds’ transport us to a world of trillings and pipings, and beaks and feathers.  There is a buzzing and a humming and a stinging throughout the ‘Wasps.’  The ‘Clouds’ drip with mist, and are dim with aerial vaporous effects.

Aristophanes was the original inventor of Bob Acres’s style of oath—­the so-called referential or sentimental swearing.  Dicaeopolis invokes Ecbatana when Shamartabas struts upon the stage.  Socrates in the ‘Clouds’ swears by the everlasting vapors.  King Hoopoe’s favorite oath is “Odds nets and birdlime.”  And the vein of humor that lies in over-ingenious, elaborate, and sustained metaphor was first worked in these comedies.  All these excellences are summed up in the incomparable wealth and flexibility of his vocabulary.  He has a Shakespearean mastery of the technicalities of every art and mystery, an appalling command of billingsgate and of the language of the cuisine, and would tire Falstaff and Prince Hal with base comparisons.  And not content with the existing resources of the Greek vocabulary, he coins grotesque or beautiful compounds,—­exquisite epithets like “Botruodoere” (bestower of the vine), “heliomanes” (drunk-with-sunlight), “myriad-flagoned phrases,” untranslatable “port-manteaus” like “plouthugieia” (health-and-wealthfulness), and Gargantuan agglomerations of syllables like the portentous olla podrida at the end of the ‘Ecclesiazusae.’

The great comic writer, as the example of Moliere proves, need not be a poet.  But the mere overflow of careless poetic power which is manifested by Aristophanes would have sufficed to set up any ordinary tragedian or lyrist.  In plastic mastery of language only two Greek writers can vie with him, Plato and Homer.  In the easy grace and native harmony of his verse he outsings all the tragedians, even that Aeschylus whom he praised as the man who had written the most exquisite songs of any poet of the time.  In his blank verse he easily strikes every note, from that of the urbane, unaffected, colloquial Attic, to parody of high or subtle tragic diction hardly distinguishable from its model.  He can adapt his metres to the expression of every shade of feeling.  He has short, snapping, fiery trochees, like sparks from their own holm oak, to represent the choler of the Acharnians; eager, joyous glyconics to bundle up a sycophant and hustle him off the stage, or for the young knights of Athens celebrating Phormio’s sea fights, and chanting, horse-taming Poseidon, Pallas, guardian of the State, and Victory, companion of the dance; the quickstep march of the trochaic tetrameter to tell how the Attic wasps, true children of the soil, charged the Persians at Marathon; and above all—­the chosen vehicle of his wildest conceits, his most audacious fancies, and his strongest appeals to the better judgment of the citizens—­the anapaestic tetrameter, that “resonant and triumphant” metre of which even Mr. Swinburne’s anapaests can reproduce only a faint and far-off echo.