This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
COMMENTARY ON THE FROGS
113

made in rations. The payments were greatly altered and increased (owing to the rise in prices) during the war and the fourth century.

Charon traditionally took one obol, the copper coin which was put in the dead man's mouth. But Theseus, the fountain-head of the Athenian constitution, has introduced the Two-obol System in Hades!

P. 15, l. 151, Morsimus.]—Son of Philocles and grand-nephew of Aeschylus, was a doctor as well as a tragic poet. No one has a good word for his poetry, and no fragments—except one conjectural half line—exist.

P. 15, l. 153, Kinesias.]—A dithyrambic poet of the new and florid school of music, from whom Aristophanes can never long keep his hands. He had frail health and thin legs; and you could not "tell right from left" in his music. The parodies of his style in the Birds are rather charming. Plato denounces him and his music in the Gorgias (501e). But it is interesting to observe that he was the author of a law reducing the extravagance and sumptuousness of choric performances—which does not look like "corrupt" art.

P. 16, l. 158, The Initiated.]—Persons initiated in the Eleusinian Mysteries, as in those of Orpheus and others, had their sins washed away, saw a great light not vouchsafed to other eyes, and had eternal bliss after death.

P. 16, l. 159, The donkey, holiday-making.]—Much as a costermonger's donkey with us celebrates its master's Bank Holiday by extra labour.

P. 18, ll. 186 f., Lethe and Sparta and the rest of