THE " ACHAR,NIANS " OF ARISTOPHANES.* THE Acharnians was produced
in 425 B.C., the seventh year of that struggle with Sparta which was to prove fatal to Athens and to Greece. Pericles was dead. No longer did the great " Olympian," as Aristophanes calls him, " lighten, thunder, and make a moil of Hellas." Plataea, the ancient ally of Athens, had fallen after a memorable siege of two years, and the sons of men who " jeoparded their lives" at Marathon had been butchered by those whose sires had then been laggards. In Corcyra the war had let loose passions fiercer, perhaps, than any of which the blood-stained annals of humanity hold record; and at Athens, after the revolt of Mytilene, the temper of the people was such that they first resolved to slay every male in it and sell the women and children into slavery, while even when they recalled that " savage decree " their repentance took the form of " putting to death," as Thucydides briefly states, "a few more than a thousand prisoners." Nor was it any wonder that they were in a sullen mood. For three years the plague had raged through- out the city; summer after summer the country-folk cooped up within its walls and " making their beds in litter along the ramparts " had seen their homesteads burned,, their vineyards and oliveyards ravaged ; spring after spring the dockyards had been " filled with' the shaping of spars for oars, with the thud of pegs, with the strapping of portholes, with flutes, with boatswains, with whistles, with catcalls," as fleet upon fleet set out with weary and, it seemed, purpose- less monotony. And now, at the festival " of the wine-press," the poet has to present his comedy—one of those comedies of the " old " school which were expected to be either personal or political—and the subject he chooses is the blessings of peace. But he does not treat his theme largely. He had not yet learned the art which from the follies or the passions of the hour can create a work that is for all -time. Here and there, indeed, he rises into greatness, and even to-day, perhaps, candidates for Parliamerit might muse with interest over the scene in which Dicaeopolis prepares to tell the truth to a demo- cratic audience by dragging forward a chopping-block, on which, as he concludes an inimitable speech with the unique peroration, " There is no sense in you," he humbly lays his head and awaits his doom. When, too, a fat " bannock-fed Boeotian" smuggles into Athens all the delicacies of fenland —" wicks, ducks, cboughs, francolins, coots, wrens, divers
geese, hares, foxes, moles, hedgehogs, weasels, brooks, otters "—finally producing from his eel-basket " the chiefest of the fifty Copaic nymphs," we can still relish the rhapsody beginning-
47 ipoo-krq crb teal arclkai ToCialadru, with which the appetising stranger, " the paragon of eels, long-desired, returned at length in the sixth year," is rapturously greeted. But for the most part the play has little interest for us to-day. It is, indeed, not a play, for it has no plot, but rather a series of farcical scenes loosely strung together. Envoys from Thrace fierce and " primed with garlic," " The Great King's Eye," talking Persian gibberish, Lamachus got up like Antient Pistol, a Megarian selling pretty girls disguised as pigs,—these are the sort of figures which follow one another as in a Christmas pantomime; and doubtless their antics and jokes pleased once, but their power to amuse has long since vanished, and the Acharnians is now rarely studied except by scholars. To these, however, Starkie's edition will be of high value, for it is a perfect storehouse of Aristophanic lore, where the student will find everything he can possibly require set out with admirable clearness and ability, so that it would be a perfect edition except for one grave error in judgment. For Mr. Starkie has not only followed the foolish fashion of the day in printing a prose translation opposite the text, but the character also of his translation is of the strangest. Noting, as he justly does, how much there "was in common between the ages of Pericles and Elizabeth which impressed itself upon the language of Aristophanes and Shakespeare, so full is it of the freshness, daring, and intel- lectual vigour of those extraordinary days," he has set himself " to give a Shakespearean flavour to his style," with results that are at times disastrous. "O bully Euripides ! 0 sweetest incony Euripides," for instance, or -" for me alone, not • The ""Miamians" of Ariitorhanes. Edited by W. 3. M. Markle. M.A., Litt.D. London : MacMillan and Co. ads. net.] forgetting my Wanes and bed-fere," or " fitchews, piquant as thyself," may be pretty phrases, but they certainly perplex ; nor can we see any particular merit in such affectations as " a smatch of pitch " and " yond is the quarry," or in writing "whom a' clepes " for "whom he calls." But having got the pure " Shakespearean flavour " well into the mouth, who can relish such blended stuff as "This is really awful, and it earns my inwards," or such a sample of very late and decaying Victorian style as : " Entre nous, he was monstrously pro- Attic' " P As Mr. Starkie proposes to edit the whole of Aristophanes, we sincerely trust he will conform to the good old rule of being content with a commentary. By doing so he will reduce the size of his edition, which now threatens to be both large and costly, while he will only eliminate a part of his work which is useless to scholars and likely to lead young students into dangerous eccentricities of style.
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