Behind the disintegration of Athenian public life, in the view of Aristophanes, lay two basic evils: democracy and irreligion. He agreed with Socrates that the sovereignty of the people had become a sovereignty of politicians; but he was convinced that the skepticism of Socrates, Anaxagoras, and the Sophists had helped to loosen those moral bonds which had once made for social order and personal integrity. In The Clouds he made uproarious fun of the new philosophy. An old-fashioned gentleman by the name of Strepsiades, who is looking for an argument that may justify him in repudiating his debts, is delighted to hear that Socrates operates a Thinking Shop where one may learn to prove anything, even if it is false. He finds his way to the "School of Very Hard Thinkers." In the middle of the classroom he sees Socrates suspended from the ceiling in a basket, engrossed in thought, while same of the students are bent down with noses to the ground.

Strep. What are those people doing, stooping so oddly?
Student. They are probing the secrets that lie deep as Tartarus.
Strep. But why-excuse me, but-their hind quarters-why are they stuck up so strangely in the air?
Stud. Their other ends are studying astronomy.
(Strepsiades asks Socrates for lessons.)
Socr. By what gods do you swear? For the gods are not a current coin with us. (Points to the chorus o f clouds.) These are the real gods.
Strep. But come, is there no Zeus?
Socr. There is no Zeus.
Strep. But who makes it rain, then?
Socr. These clouds. For have you ever seen rain without clouds? But if it were Zeus he ought to rain in fine weather as well as when clouds appear . . . .
Strep. But tell me, who is it that thunders: This makes me tremble.
Socr. These clouds, as they roll, thunder.
Strep. How?
Socr. When they are full of water, and are driven along, they fall heavily upon each other, and burst with a clap.
Strep. But who drives them? Is it not Zeus?
Socr. Not at all; the ethereal Vortex drives them on.
Strep. So the greatest of gods is Vortex. But what makes the clap of thunder?
Socr. I will teach you from your own case. Were you ever, after being stuffed with broth at a festival, later disturbed in your stomach, and did a tumult suddenly rumble through you?

In another scene Pheidippides, son of Strepsiades, meets in personification Just Argument and Unjust Argument. The first tells him that he must imitate the stoic virtues of the men of Marathon, but the other preaches to him the new morality. What good, asks Unjust Argument, have men ever gained by justice, or virtue, or moderation? For one honest successful and respected man there can always be found ten dishonest successful and respected men. Consider the gods themselves: they lied, stole, murdered, and committed adultery; and they are worshiped by all the Greeks. When Just Argument doubts that most successful men have been dishonest, Unjust Argument asks him:

Come now, from what class do our lawyers spring?
J. A. Well – from the blackguards.
U. A. Surely. Tell me, again, what are our tragic poets?
J. A. Blackguards.
U. A. And our public orators?
J. A. Blackguards all.
U. A. Now look about you. (Turning and pointing to the audience.) Which class among our friends here seems the most numerous?
(J. A. gravely examines the audience.)
J. A. The blackguards have it by a large majority.

Pheidippides is so apt a pupil of Unjust Argument that he beats his father, on the ground that he is strong enough to do it and enjoys it; and besides, he asks, "Did you not beat me when I was a boy?" Strepsiades begs for mercy in the name of Zeus, but Pheidippides informs him that Zeus no longer exists, having been replaced by Vortex. The enraged father runs out into the streets, and calls upon all good citizens to destroy this new philosophy. They attack and burn down the Thinking Shop, and Socrates barely escapes with his life.

We do not know what part this comedy played in the tragedy of Socrates. It was brought out in 423, twenty-four years before the famous trial. Its good-humored satire does not seem to have offended the philosopher; we are told that he stood throughout the performance, to give his enemies a better shot. Plato pictures Socrates and Aristophanes as friends after the performance; Plato himself recommended the play to Dionysius I of Syracuse as a jolly extravaganza, and maintained his own friendship with Aristophancs even after his master's death. Of the three accusers of Socrates in 399 one, Meletus, was a child when the comedy was presented, and another Anytus, was on friendly terms with Socrates after the play. Probably the later circulation of the play as literature did the sage more harm than its original performance; Socrates himself, in Plato's report of his defense, referred to the play as one of the major sources of that bad reputation which was prejudicing his case with the jurors.

There was another target in Athens at which Aristophanes aimed his satire; and in this case the mood was one of implacable hostility. He distrusted the skepticisms of the Sophists, the moral, economic, and political individualism that was undermining the state, the sentimental feminism that was agitating the women, and the socialism that was arousing the slaves. All these evils he saw at their clearest in Euripides; and he resolved to destroy with laughter the influence of the great dramatist upon the mind of Greece.

He began in 411 with a play which he called The Thesmophoriazusae, from the women who celebrated in sexual exclusiveness the feast of Demeter and Persephone. The assembled devotees discuss the latest quips of Euripides against their sex, and plan revenge. Euripides gets wind of the proceedings, and persuades his father-in-law Mnesilochus to dress as a woman and enter the meeting to defend him. The first complainant alleges that the tragic dramatist has deprived her of a living: formerly she made wreaths for the temples, but since Euripides has shown that there are no gods, the temple business has been ruined. Mnesilochus defends Euripides on the ground that his worst sayings about women are visibly and audibly true, and are mild compared with what women themselves know to be their faults. The ladies suspect that this traducer of the sex cannot be a woman; they tear off Mnesilochus' disguise, and he saves himself from dismemberment only by snatching a babe from a woman's arms and threatening to kill it if they touch him. As they nevertheless attack hilts, he unwraps the child, and finds that it is a wineskin disguised to escape the collector of internal revenue. He proposes to cut its throat just the same, much to the distress of its owner. "Spare my darling!" she cries; "or at least bring a bowl, and if it must die, let us catch its blood." Mnesilochus solves the problem by drinking the wine, and meanwhile sending an appeal to Euripides for rescue. Euripides appears in various parts from his plays – now as Menelaus, now as Perseus, now as Echo – and finally arranges Mnesilochus' escape.

The Frogs (405) returns to the assault despite Euripides' death. Dionysus, god of the drama, is dissatisfied with the surviving playwrights of Athens, and descends to Hades to bring back Euripides. As he is ferried over to the lower world a choir of frogs greets him with a croaking chorus that must have provided a month's catchword for young Athenians. Aristophanes pokes much fun at Dionysus in passing, and boldly, parodies the Mysteries of Eleusis. When the god arrives in Hades he finds Euripides attempting to unseat Aeschylus as king of all dramatists. Aeschylus accuses Euripides of spreading skepticism and a dangerous casuistry, and of corrupting the morals of Athenian women and youth; ladies of refinement, he says, have been known to kill themselves through shame at having heard Euripides' obscenities. A pair of scales is brought in, and each poet throws into it lines from his plays; one mighty phrase of Aeschylus (here the satire strikes the older poet too) tips the scale against a dozen of Euripides. At last Aeschylus proposes that the younger dramatist shall leap into one scale with wife, children, and baggage, while he will guarantee to find a couplet that will outweigh them all. In the end the great skeptic loses the contest, and Aeschylus is brought back to Athens as victor. This oldest known essay in literary criticism received the first prize from the judges, and so pleased the audience that another performance of it was given a few days afterward.

In a middling play called The Ecclesiazusae (393) – i.e., The Assembly-women – Aristophanes turned his laughter upon the radical movement in general. The ladies of Athens disguise themselves as men, pack the Assembly, outvote their husbands, brothers, and sons, and elect themselves rulers of the state. Their leader is a fiery suffragette, Praxagora, who berates her sex as fools for letting themselves be ruled by such dolts as men, and proposes that all wealth shall be divided equally among the citizens, leaving the slaves uncontaminated with gold. The attack upon Utopia takes a more graceful form in Aristophanes' masterpiece, The Birds (414). Two citizens who despair of Athens climb up to the abode of the birds, hoping to find there an ideal life. With the help of the birds they build, between earth and heaven, a Utopian city, Nephelococcygia, or Cloud-Cuckoo-Land. The birds, in a chorus as lyrically perfect as anything in the tragic poets, apostrophize mankind:

Ye children of man, whose life is a span,
Protracted with sorrow from day to day,
Naked and featherless, feeble and querulous,
Sickly calamitous creatures of clay,
Attend to the words of the sovereign birds,
Immortal, illustrious lords of the air,
Who survey from on high, with a merciful eve,
Your struggles of misers, labor, and care.

The birds plan to intercept all communication between the gods and men; no sacrifices shall be allowed to mount to heaven; soon, say the reformers, the old gods will stave, and the birds will be supreme. New gods are invented in the image of birds, and those conceived in the image of men are deposed. Finally an embassy comes from Olympus, seeking a truce; the leader of the birds agrees to take as his wife the handmaiden of Zeus, and the play ends in a happy marriage.

Aristophanes is an unclassifiable mixture of beauty, wisdom, and filth. When the mood is upon him he can write lyrics of purest Greek serene, which no translator has ever yet conveyed. His dialogue is life itself, or perhaps it is swifter, racier, more vigorous than life dares be. He belongs with Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Dickens in the lusty vitality of his style; and like theirs his characters give us more keenly the shape and aroma of the time than all the works of the historians; no one who has not read Aristophanes can know the Athenians. His plots are ridiculous, and are put together with an almost extempore carelessness; sometimes the main theme is exhausted before the play is half through, and the remainder limps forward on the crutches of burlesque. The humor is generally of a low order; it cracks and groans with facile puns, drags itself out to tragic lengths, and too often depends upon digestion, reproduction, and excretion. In The Acharnians we hear of a character who eases himself continuously for eight months; in The Clouds the major forms of human waste are mingled with sublime philosophy;' every second page offers us rumps, wind, bosoms, gonads, coitus, pederasty, onanism; everything is here. He charges his old rival, Cratinus, with nocturnal incontinence. He is the most contemporary of ancient poets, for nothing is so timeless as obscenity. Coming to him after any other Greek author – worst of all, after Euripides – he seems depressingly vulgar, and we find it difficult to imagine the same audience enjoying them both.

If we are good conservatives the can stomach all this on the ground that Aristophanes attacks every form of radicalism, and upholds devotedly every ancient virtue and vice. He is the most immoral of all Greek writers known to us, but he hopes to make up for it by attacking immorality. He is always found on the side of the rich, but he denounces cowardice; he lies pitilessly about Euripides, living and dead, but he assails dishonesty; he describes the women of Athens as unbelievably coarse, but he exposes Euripides for defaming them; he burlesques the gods so boldly [Some of the gods, he tells us, keep brothels in heaven.] that in comparison with the pious Socrates we must picture him as an hilarious atheist – but he is all for religion, and accuses the philosophers of undermining the gods. Yet it took real courage to caricature the powerful Cleon, and to paint the faults of Demos to Demos' face; it took insight to see, in the trend of religion and morals from sophistic skepticism to epicurean individualism, a basic danger to the life of Athens. Perhaps Athens would have fared better if it had taken some of his advice, moderated her imperialism, made an early peace with Sparta, and mitigated with aristocratic leadership the chaos and corruption of post-Periclean democracy.

Aristophanes failed because he did not take his own counsels seriously enough to observe them himself. His excesses of pornography and abuse were partly responsible for the law forbidding personal satire; and though the law was soon repealed, the Old Comedy of political criticism died before the death of Aristophanes (385), and was replaced, even in his later plays, by the Middle Comedy of manners and romance. But the vitality of the Greek comic theater disappeared along with its extravagance and brutality. Philemon and 14lenander rose and passed and were forgotten, white Aristophanes survived all changes of moral and literary fashions to come down to our own time with eleven of his forty-two plays intact. Even today, despite all difficulties of understanding and translation, Aristophanes is alive; and, if we hold our noses, we can read him with profane delight.

VII. The Historians

Prose was not completely forgotten in this heyday of dramatic poetry. Oratory, stimulated by democracy and litigation, became one of the passions of Greece. As early as 466 Corax of Syracuse wrote a treatise, Techne Logon (The Art of Words), to guide the citizen who wished to address an assembly or a jury; here already are the traditional divisions of an oration into introduction, narrative, argument, subsidiary remarks, and peroration. Gorgias brought the art to Athens, and Antiphon used the ornate style of Gorgias in speeches and pamphlets devoted to oligarchical propaganda. In Lysias Greek oratory became more natural and vivid; but it was only in the greatest statesmen, like Themistocles and Pericles, that the public address rose above all visible artifice, and proved the effectiveness of simple speech. The new weapon was sharpened by the Sophists, and so thoroughly exploited by their pupils that when the oligarchic party seized power in 404 it forbade the further teaching of rhetoric.

The great achievement of Periclean prose was history. In a sense it was the fifth century that discovered the past, and consciously sought for a perspective of man in time. In Herodotus historiography has all the charm and vigor of youth; in Thucydides fifty years later, it has already reached a degree of maturity which no later age has ever surpassed. What separates and distinguishes these two historians is the Sophist philosophy. Herodotus was the simpler, perhaps the kindlier, certainly the more cheerful spirit. He was born in Halicarnassus about 484, of a family exalted enough to participate in political intrigue; because of his uncle's adventures he was exiled at the age of thirty-two, and began those far-reaching travels that supplied the background for his Histories. He passed down through Phoenicia to Egypt, as far south as Elephantine; he moved west to Cyrene, east to Susa, and north to the Greek cities on the Black Sea. Wherever he went he observed and inquired with the eye of a scientist and the curiosity of a child; and when, about 447, he settled down in Athens, he was armed with a rich assortment of notes concerning the geography, history, and manners of the Mediterranean states. With these notes, and a little plagiarizing of Hecataeus and other predecessors, he composed the most famous of all historical works, recording the life and history of Egypt, the Near East, and Greece from their legendary origins to the close of the Persian War. An ancient story tells haw lie read parts of his book publicly at Athens and Olympia, and so pleased the Athenians with his account of the war, and their exploits in it, that they voted him twelve talents ($60,000) – which any historian will consider too pleasant to be true.

The introduction announces the purpose of the book in grand style:

This is a presentation of the Inquiries (Historiai) of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, to the end that time may not obliterate the great and marvelous deeds of the Hellenes and the Barbarians; and especially that the causes for which they waged war with one another may not be forgotten.

Since all the nations of the eastern Mediterranean are brought into the narrative, the book is, in a limited sense, a "universal history," much broader in its scope than the narrow subject of Thucydides. The story is unconsciously unified by the contrast of barbarian despotism with Greek democracy, and moves, though by halting steps and confusing digressions, to a foreshadowed and epic end at Salamis. The purpose is to record "wondrous deeds and wars," and in truth the tale sometimes recalls Gibbon's regrettable misunderstanding of history as "little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind." Nevertheless Herodotus, though he speaks in only the most incidental way of literature, science, philosophy, and art, finds room for a thousand interesting illustrations of the dress, manners, morals, and beliefs of the societies he describes. He tells us how Egyptian cats jump into the fire, how the Danubians get drunk on smells, how the walls of Babylon were built, how the Massagetae eat their parents, and how the priestess of Athena at Pedasus grew a mighty beard. He presents not only kings and queens, but men of all degrees; and women, who are excluded from Thucydides, enliven these pages with their scandals, their beauty, their cruelties, and their charm.

There is, as Strabo says, "much nonsense in Herodotus"; but our historian, like Aristotle, covers a vast field, and has many opportunities to err. His ignorance is as wide as his learning, his credulity is as great as his wisdom. He thinks that the semen of Ethiopians is black, accepts the legend that the Lacedaemonians won battles because they had brought the bones of Orestes to Sparta, and reports incredible figures for the size of Xerxes' army, the casualties of the Persians, and the almost woundless victories of the Greeks. His account is patriotic, but not unjust; he gives both sides of most political disputes," signalizes the heroism of the invaders, and testifies to the honor and chivalry of the Persians. When he depends upon foreign informants he makes his greatest mistakes; so he thinks that Nebuchadrezzar was a woman, that the Alps are a river, and that Cheops came after Rameses III. But when he deals with matters that he has had a chance to observe in person he is more reliable, and his statements are increasingly confirmed as our knowledge grows.

He swallows many superstitions, records many miracles, quotes oracles piously, and darkens his pages with omens and auguries; he gives the dates of Semele, Dionysus, and Heracles; and presents all history, like a Greek Bossuet, as the drama of a Divine Providence rewarding the virtues and punishing the sins, crimes, and insolent prosperity of men. But he has his rationalistic moments, perhaps having heard the Sophists in his later years: he suggests that Homer and Hesiod gave name and form to the Olympian deities, that custom determines men's faiths, and that one man knows as much as another about the gods; having accepted Providence as the final arbiter of history, he puts it aside, and looks for natural causes; he compares and identifies the myths of Dionysus and Osiris in the manner of a scientist; he smiles tolerantly at some tales of divine intervention, and offers a possible natural explanation;'" and he reveals his general method with a twinkle in his eye when he says: "I am under obligation to tell what is reported, but I am not obliged to believe it; and let this hold for every narrative in this history." He is the first Greek historian whose works have copse down to us; and in that sense Cicero may be forgiven for calling him the Father of History. Lucian, like most of the ancients, ranked him above Thucydides.'

Nevertheless the difference between the mind of Herodotus and that of Thucvdides is almost the difference between adolescence and maturity. Thucydides is one of the phenomena of the Greek Enlightenment, a descendant of the Sophists as Gibbon was a spiritual nephew of Bayle and Voltaire. His father was a rich Athenian who owned gold mines in Thrace; his mother was a Thracian of distinguished family. He received all the education available in Athens, and grew up in the odor of skepticism. When the Peloponnesian War broke out he kept a record of it from day to day. In 430 he suffered from the plague. In 424, aged thirty-six (or forty), he was chosen one of two generals to command a naval expedition to Thrace. Because he failed to lead his forces to Amphipolis in time to relieve it from siege, he was exiled by the Athenians. He spent the next twenty years of his life in travel, especially in the Peloponnesus; to this direct acquaintance with the enemy we owe something of the impressive impartiality that distinguishes his book. The oligarchic revolution of 404 ended his exile, and he returned to Athens. He died – some say by murder – in or before 396, leaving unfinished his History o f the Peloponnesian War.

He begins it simply:

Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peioponnesians and the Athenians from the moment that it broke out, believing that it would be an important war, and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it.

He opens his introductory narrative where Herodotus left off, at the close of the Persian War. It is a pity that the genius of the greatest Greek historians saw nothing worthier of relation in Greek life than its wars. Herodotus wrote partly with an eye to entertain the educated reader; Thucydides writes to furnish information for future historians, and the guidance of precedent for future statesmanship. Herodotus wrote in a loose and easygoing style, inspired perhaps by the rambling epics of Homer; Thucydides, like one who has heard the philosophers, the orators, and the dramatists, writes in a style often involved and obscure because it attempts to be at once brief, precise, and profound, a style occasionally spoiled by Gorgian rhetoric and embellishment, but sometimes as terse and vivid as Tacitus, and rising, in the more crucial moments, to a dramatic power as intense as anything in Euripides; nothing in the dramatists can surpass the pages that describe the expedition to Syracuse, the vacillations of Nicias, and the horrors that followed his defeat. Herodotus ranged from place to place and from age to age; Thucydides forces his story into a rigid chronological frame of seasons and years, sacrificing the continuity of his narrative. Herodotus wrote in terms of personalities rather than processes, feeling that processes operate through personalities; Thucydides, though he recognizes the role of exceptional individuals in history, and occasionally lightens his theme with a portrait of Pericles or Alcibiades or Nicias, leans rather to impersonal recording and the consideration of causes, developments, and results. Herodotus wrote of far-off events reported to him in most cases at second or third hand; Thucydides speaks often as an eyewitness, or as one who has spoken with eyewitnesses, or has seen the original documents; in several instances he gives the documents concerned. He has a keen conscience for accuracy; even his geography has been verified in detail. He seldom passes moralistic judgments upon men or events; he lets his patrician scorn of Athenian democracy get the better of him in picturing Cleon, but for the greater part he keeps himself aloof from his story, gives the facts with fairness to both sides, and recounts the story of Thucydides' brief militarv career as if he had never known, much less been, the man. He is the father of scientific method in history, and is proud of the care and industry with which he has worked. "On the whole," he says, with a glance at Herodotus,

the conclusions I have drawn from the proofs quoted may, I believe, be safely relied on. Assuredly they will not be disturbed either by the lays of a poet displaying the exaggeration of his craft, or by the compositions of the chroniclers that are attractive at truth's expense-the subjects they treat being out of the reach of evidence, and time having robbed most of them of historical value by enthroning them in the region of legend. Turning from these, we can rest satisfied with having proceeded upon the clearest data, and having arrived at conclusions as exact as can be expected in matters of such antiquity . . . . The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future-which, in the course of human affairs, must resemble, if it does not reflect, the past-1 shall be content. In fine, I have written my work not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.

Nevertheless, he yields accuracy to interest in one particular: he has a passion for putting elegant speeches into the mouths of his characters. He frankly admits that these orations are mostly imaginary, but they help him to explain and vivify personalities, ideas, and events. He claims that each speech represents the substance of an address actually given at the time; if this is true, all Greek statesmen and generals must have studied rhetoric with Gorgias, philosophy with the Sophists, and ethics with Thrasymachus. The speeches have all the same style, the same subtlety, the same realism of view; they make the laconic Lacoman as windy as any Sophist-bred Athenian. They put the most undiplomatic arguments into the mouths of diplomats, [E.g., the speech of Alcibiades at Sparta, vi, 20.89.] and the most compromising honesty into the words of generals. The "Funeral Oration" of Pericles is an excellent essay on the virtues of Athens, and comes with fine grace from the pen of an exile; but Pericles was famous for simplicity of speech rather than for rhetoric; and Plutarch spoils the romance by saying that Pericles left nothing written, and that of his sayings hardly anything was preserved.

Thucydides has defects corresponding to his virtues. He is as severe a Thracian, and lacks the vivacity and wit of the Athenian spirit; there ' no humor in his book. He is so absorbed in "this war, of which Thucydides the historian" (a proudly recurring phrase) that he has an eye only for political and military events. He fills his pages with martial details, but makes no mention of any artist, or any work of art. He seeks causes sedulously, but seldom sinks beneath political to economic factors in the de termination of events. Though writing for future generations, he tells us nothing of the constitutions of the Greek states, nothing of the life of the cities, nothing of the institutions of society. He is as exclusive toward women as towards the gods; he will not have them in his story; and he makes the gallant Pericles, who risked his career for a courtesan advocate of feminine freedom, say that "a woman's best fame is to be as seldom a possible mentioned by men, either for censure or for praise." Face to face with the greatest age in the history of culture, he loses himself in the logic chopping fluctuations of military victory and defeat, and leaves unsung the vibrant life of the Athenian mind. He remains a general even after he has become an historian.

We are grateful for him, nevertheless, and must not complain too much that he did not write what he did not undertake to write. Here at least is a historical method, a reverence for truth, an acuteness of observation, an impartiality of judgment, a passing splendor of language and fascination of style, a mind both sharp and profound, whose ruthless realism is a tonic to our naturally romantic souls. Here are no legends, no myths, and no miracles. He accepts the heroic tales, but tries to explain them in naturalistic terms. As for the gods, he is devastatingly silent; they have no place in his history. He is sarcastic about oracles and their safe ambiguity, and scornfully exposes the stupidity of Nicias in relying upon oracles rather titan knowledge. He recognizes no guiding Providence, no divine plan, not even "progress"; he sees life and history as a tragedy at once sordid and noble, redeemed now and then by great men, but always relapsing into superstition and war. In him the conflict between religion and philosophy is decided; and philosophy wins.

Plutarch and Athenaeus refer to hundreds of Greek historians. Nearly all of them but Herodotus and Thucydides, in the Golden Age, have been covered up by the silt of time; and of the later historians only paragraphs remain. The case is no different with the other forms of Greek literature. Of the hundreds of traffic dramatists who won prizes at the Dionysia, we have a few plays by three; of the many comic writers we have one; of the great philosophers we have two. All in all, not more than one-twentieth survives from the critically acclaimed literature of fifth-century Greece; and from the earlier and later centuries even less.` Most of what we have comes from Athens; the other cities, as we can tell from the philosophers that they sent to Athens, were fertile in genius too, but their culture was sooner engulfed by barbarism from without and from below, and their manuscripts were lost in the disorder of revolution and war. We must judge the whole from the fragments of a part.