hordes are fighting, the Egyptian is ploughing, the Phœnician is carrying his merchandise over the sea, the Spartan is undergoing corporal discipline, and the Athenian is "sitting in the jury-box."[1]
This is perhaps the least amusing of all Aristophanes's productions to a modern reader, although it was adopted by Racine as the basis of his only comedy, "Les Plaideurs." There are but two characters in it of any importance to the action, a father and son. Philocleon,[2] the father, is strongly possessed with this mania for the courts. His family cannot keep him at home. He neglects his person, hardly sleeps at night for thinking of his duties in the courts, and is off before daylight in the morning to secure a good seat; he even declares the cock must have been bribed, by some profligates who have reason to dread the terrors of the law, not to crow loud enough to awake him. He keeps in his house "a whole beach" of little round pebbles, that he may always have one ready for giving his vote; and goes about holding his three fingers pinched together as if he had got one between them ready to slip into the ballot-box. In vain has his son remonstrated, and had him washed and dressed, and sent for the physicians, and even the priests, to try to rid him of his malady. And now, as a last resource, they have been obliged to lock him up, and set a
