424 HISTORY OF THE women are represented as compelling their husbands to come to terms, by refusing them the exercise of their marital rights ; but the care with which he abstains from any direct political satire shows how fluctuating all relations were at that time, and how little Aristophanes could tell whither to turn himself with the vigour of a man who has chosen his party. In the T/icsmophoriaznscP, nearly contemporary with the Lysistrata,* Aristophanes keeps still further aloof from politics, and plunges into literary criticism, (such as before Only served him for a collateral orna- ment,) which he helps out with a complete apparatus of indecent jokes. Euripides passed for a woman-hater at Athens : but without any reason ; for, in his tragedies, the charming, susceptible mind of woman is as often the motive of good as of bad actions. General opinion, how- ever, had stamped him as a misogynist. Accordingly, the piece turns on the fiction that the women had resolved at the feast of the Thesmo- phoria, when they were quite alone, to take vengeance on Euripides, and punish him with death ; and that Euripides was desirous of getting some one whom he might pass off for a Avoman, and send as such into this assembly. The first person who occurs to his mind, the delicate, effeminate Agathon — an excellent opportunity for travestying Agathon's manner — will not undertake the business, and only furnishes the costume, in which the aged Mnesilochus, the father-in-law and friend of Euripides, is dressed up as a woman. Mnesilochus conducts his friend's cause with great vigour; but he is denounced, his sex is discovered, and, on the complaint of the women, he is committed to the custody of a Scythian police-slave, until Euripides, having in vain endeavoured, in the guise of a tragic Menelaus and Perseus, to carry off this new Helen and Andro- meda, entices the Scythian from his watch over Mnesilochus by an artifice of a grosser and more material kind. The chief joke in the whole piece is that Aristophanes, though he pretends to punish Eu- ripides for his calumnies against women, is much more severe upon the fair sex than Euripides had ever been.
- The date assigned to the Thcsmopkoriasusa, 01. 92, 1. b.c. 411, rests partly on
its relation to the Andromeda of Euripides, (see chap. XXV. § 17, note,) Avhich was a year older, and which, from its relation to the Frogs, (Schol. Aristoph. Frogs, 53,) is placed in 01. 91, 4. b. c. 412. No doubt the expression lyl'oo? irti would also allow us to place the Andromeda in 413 ; and therefore, the Thesmophoriazusa? in 412 ; but this is opposed by the clear mention of the defeat of Charminus in a sea-fight, (T/iesmoph. 804;) which falls, according to Thucyd. viii. 41, in the very beginning of 411. "Without setting aside the Schol. Frogs, 53, and some other corresponding notices in the Ravenna scholia on the Thesmophoriazusa;, we cannot bring down this comedy to the year 410 : consequently, the passage in v. 808 about the deposed councillors, cannot refer to the expulsion of the Five hundred by the oligarchy of the Four hundred, (Thucyd. viii. 69,) which did not take place till after the Dionysia of the year 411.; but to the circumstance that the (ZouXivm) of the year 412, Ol. 91, 4, were obliged to give up a considerable part of their functions to the board of ^sfiovXii, (Thucyd. viii. 1.)
