A PLAY OF ARISTOPHANES.*
THE Thesmophoriazusae is not one of Aristophanes's most renowned comedies. It has not the lyrical beauty of the Clouds ; it is not as profound in criticism as the Frogs. Yet
it is eminently characteristic of the poet. As you read it, you listen alternately, in Heine's phrase, to the song of nightin- gales and to the chattering of apes. Maybe the chattering predominates ; yet the imagination of Aristophanes is always finely inspired, and there is scarce a line whose humour has lost its meaning, or whose wit has faded into insipidity. The title, moreover, and the occasion suggest returning spring and the reawakened earth. At the great festival of Demeter the Athenian women worshipped the goddess who carpeted the meadows with flowers :—
[ioaa occei xpos.os zisAct Away' citt icaltaxim Iced ciyaXAMecc 6rixtrBoy scipstecros And the first words of the play express a longing for the spring : 'fl Zeu, xaiLlY poi ITOT£ pavinaTar, says Mnesi-
lochus. " Will the swallow never come ? " But, after all, the real purpose of the play is to burlesque Euripides, and the poet soon loses sight of the sacred Thesmophoria.
The plot is simple and easily intelligible. Euripides has heard that on the third day of the festival, "when women have most leisure," he is to be tried and punished for the ferocity wherewith he has attacked the female sex. He there- fore asks Agathon to disguise himself as a woman, which is easy, and to plead his colleague's case. Agathon is pictured, in an immortal scene, as the very type and exemplar of the aesthetic poet. His effeminate garb, says he, corresponds to the nature of the odes which he is moulding, and which he cannot shape " until they are warmed and softened in the sun." "I choose my dress to suit my poesy," he says to his visitors :— " A poet, sir, must needs adapt his ways To the high thoughts which animate his soul. And when he sings of women, he assumes A woman's garb, and dons a woman's habit."
But he stoutly refuses to bear the burdens of Euripides, or to encounter his risks, quoting against the tragic poet one of his own lines :—
xalpus OpZis '71- GOT ;pa a'ob xistpgry ;oaia; ;
So Euripides, never at a loss, always a man of shifts and tricks, dresses out his old kinsman Mnesilochus as a woman, and sends him into the assembly. The trial of Euripides is a piece of admirable farce. The charge having been brought against the poet, Mnesilochus, in one of Aristophanes's wittiest speeches, rebuts it after his own fashion. He admits that all that has been said by the lathes against the poet is true. He admits that Euripides has found out many things to the discredit of women, Out, says he triumphantly, there are a thousand tricks of womankind, of which Euripides knows nothing. " Then
The Theirmophoriamene of Aristophanes. The Greek Text, Revised, with a Free Translation into English Verses, by B. B. Rogers, M.A. London: G. Bell and Sons. [U. Bd.] wherefore rail we at Euripides ? " This oration can only be appreciated at length and in the original. But it would be very difficult to match its vin oomica in the whole range of the drama. One learned commentator, Fritzsche, finds it "plena, faoetiarum et panne diving"; and, though the last epithet is excessive, there can be no doubt that it is a perfect masterpiece. The eloquence of Mnesilochus, how- ever, is of no avail ; the obliging kinsman of Euripides is discovered to be a man, is strapped to a plank by one of the Scythian archers, who were the police of Athens, and bidden to await his execution.
The scene that follows is an elaborate and entertaining bur- lesque of several plays of Euripides. It resembles a Christmas pantomime, if you can imagine a pantomime devoted to the ridicule of a great poet ; and Mnesilochus and Euripides shift and change their characters as quickly and fantastically as the actors in a Parisian revue. Now Mnesilochus masquerades as Helen, while Euripides, dressed up in the rags of Menelaus, attempts his rescue. Now Euripides is Perseus, determined to save the hapless Andromeda from the rock to which she is chained, or, in other words, to set Mnesilochus free from his plank. And at each change the dialogue is pilfered from the play of Euripides which suggests it Lines from the Helen and Andromeda are adapted to the purpose of the moment with exquisite humour, and the action moves with a rapidity unusual in Aristophanes, who commonly prefers a succes- sion of interludes to a closely woven plot. The main purpose of the play is to ridicule Agathon and Euripides. This ridicule, however, need not be taken as a sign of violent hostility. No doubt Aristophanes regarded Euripides in the same light wherein he regarded Socrates, as a subverter of tradition. He was a staunch conservative, who loved the old customs and the ancient drama. How should Euripides, who attempted to humanise tragedy, and to make it solve the problems of the day, appeal to one who loved the old- fashioned dignity of Aeschylus, the austere perfection of Sophocles ? But, as Mr. J. A. Symonds long ago pointed out, the ridicule of Aristophanes carried no enmity with it. The comic poet was privileged to exaggerate as he would. He was no more upon oath than the writer of lapidary inscrip- tions, and whatever he might choose to say in dispraise of his friends could be accepted for what it was worth. Though he laughs at Agathon in the Thesmophoriazusae, Agathon was still his friend; and the Symposium makes it quite clear that Plato cherished no animosity against him.
Mr. Rogers is doing a great service to scholarship by com- pleting his excellent edition of Aristophanes. In this last volume he has given us a sound text of the Thesmophoriazusae, and has elucidated the text with a set of notes which make plain the countless allusions of the poet. Every line of the play held a jest, to which the quick wits of an Athenian audience would eagerly respond, and Mr. Rogers has done much to make the jests intelligible to English readers. To this task he has added the yet more difficult task of transla- tion. It would be monstrously to underrate the difficulty if we said that he had succeeded. Aristophanes has hitherto defied all translators. Hookham Frere, Professor Murray, and Mr. Rogers, indeed, are the only scholars who have met even with a measure of success. Nightingales and monkeys are equally beyond the reach of most. There is always a risk that an English translator will make the dialogue too familiar and set the poetry to a jingling tune. Moreover, it is an impossible task to transfer a joke from one language to another. Mr. Rogers now and again attempts it with an unsatisfactory result. " A Rifled Volunteer," for instance, is a sorry equivalent for orparivoolzat, and it would be better, we think, in such cases to rest content with a modester equivalent. However, this praise at least is due to Mr. Rogers : his version is easily intelligible without reference to the Greek, and we believe that it would give a reader who knew no language save English a fair idea of the original. We are told in a note " that the greater part of this translation was composed from memory, when the translator had no copy of Aristophanes at hand." This amazing tour de force reminds us of the Homeric bards, or of those ancient scholars who, having no classical texts, committed to memory the authors upon whom they lectured. But the version, if inaccurate in detail, yet presents a general accuracy, and that is as much as we can ask of the most scrupulous translator.
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