And here lies his grudge against Euripides.  Euripides is one of those who call Saperdion a monster—­who slander the world of sense with its beauties and its enjoyments, or who contemptuously set it aside.  “Born on the day of Salamis—­when heroes walked the earth; and gods were reverenced and not discussed—­when Greeks guarded their home with its abundant joys, and left barbarian lands to their own starvation—­he has lived to belie every tradition of that triumphant time.  He has joined himself with a band of starved teachers and reformers to cut its very foundations away.  He exalts death over life, misery over happiness; or, if he admits happiness, it is as an empty name.”

“Moreover, he reasons away the gods; for they are, according to him, only forms of nature.  Zeus is the atmosphere.  Poseidon is the sea.  Necessity rules the universe.  Duty, once the will of the gods, is now a voice within ourselves bidding us renounce pleasure, and giving us no inducement to do so.”

“He reasons away morality, for he shows there is neither right nor wrong, neither ‘yours’ nor ‘mine,’ nor natural privilege, nor natural subjection, that may not be argued equally for or against.  Why be in such a hurry to pay one’s debt, to attend one’s mother, to bring a given sacrifice?”

“He reasons away social order, for he declares the slave as good as his master, woman equal to man, and even the people competent to govern itself.  ’Why should not the tanner, the lampseller, or the mealman, who knows his own business so well, know that of the State too?’”

“He ignores the function of poetry, which is to see beauty, and to create it:  for he places utility above grace, truth above all beauty.  He drags human squalor on to the scene because he recognizes its existence.  The world of the poet’s fancy, that world into which he was born, does not exist for him.  He spoils his art as well as his life, carving back to bull what another had carved into a sphinx.”

“How are such proceedings to be dealt with?  They appeal to the mob.  The mob is not to be swayed by polished arguments or incidental hints.  We don’t scare sparrows with a Zeus’ head, though the eagle may recognize it as his lord’s.  A big Priapus is the figure required.”

“And this,” so Aristophanes resumes his defence, “comedy supplies.  Comedy is the fit instrument of popular conviction:  and the wilder, the more effective:  since it is the worship of life, of the originative power of nature; and since that power has lawlessness for its apparent law.  Even Euripides, with his shirkings and his superiority, has been obliged to pay tribute to the real.  He could not shake it off all at once.  He tacked a Satyric play to some five of his fifty trilogies:  and if this was grim enough at first, he threw off the mask in Alkestis, showing how one could be indecent in a decent way."[44]