family given by Plato in Republic V. The dates will not allow this; but it is, of course, quite likely that Plato had expressed some such views in lectures or conversation before he put them in writing. The schemes are far from identical. In Plato the sexes are equal; in Aristophanes the men are disfranchised. The marriage system is entirely different. The communism and the simplification of life might be sympathetic parodies of Plato, but Aristophanes will not have the severe training or the military saints at any price. The Ecclêsiazûsæ has a larger subject than the merely political Lysistrata, but it is a much tamer play.
The Plutus (388 B.C.) is the last play of Aristophanes preserved, and is very different from the rest. It may almost be called a play without personalities, without politics, without parabasis; that is, it belongs practically not to the old but to the middle comedy—the transition to the pure comedy of manners. It is, indeed, still founded on a sort of 'hypothesis,' like the Birds or the Acharnians. Plutus ('Wealth') is a blind god; if we could catch him and get his eyesight restored by a competent oculist or a miracle-working temple, what a state of things it would be! The main lines of the play form merely the working out of this idea. But the new traits appear in many details; we have the comic slave, impudent, rascally, but indispensable, who plays such an important part in Menander and Terence, and we have character-drawing for its own sake in the hero's friend Blepsidêmus. We hear of two later plays called Aiolosikon* and Côcalus,* which Aristophanes gave to his son Arârôs to make his debut with, Sikon is a cook's name; so, presumably, the first represented the old Wind-god
