第447页 / 共1391页

Aristophanes, in one of his later comedies (Frogs), speaks of

'thousands of tragedy-making prattlers,' whose attempts at poetry

he compares to the chirping of swallows; 'their garrulity went

far beyond Euripides,'-'they appeared once upon the stage, and

there was an end of them.' To a man of genius who had a real

appreciation of the godlike Aeschylus and the noble and gentle

Sophocles, though disagreeing with some parts of their 'theology'

(Rep.), these 'minor poets' must have been contemptible and

intolerable. There is no feeling stronger in the dialogues of

Plato than a sense of the decline and decay both in literature

and in politics which marked his own age. Nor can he have been

expected to look with favour on the licence of Aristophanes, now

at the end of his career, who had begun by satirizing Socrates in

the Clouds, and in a similar spirit forty years afterwards had

satirized the founders of ideal commonwealths in his

Eccleziazusae, or Female Parliament (Laws).