morality of Athens to the dissolvent of all creeds—individual reason—almost as clearly as any dramas of Euripides. The conservative comedian saw farther than the tragic sophist, but his penetrating sight was sharpened by the same conscious contrast of things old and new in which Euripides found the pleasures of purely negative thought. The secret of Aristophanes—by far the most astonishing figure in the whole crowd of Athenian poets and philosophers and orators, a man whose poetry, exquisite in spite of being perpetually draggled through the mire, is full of profound reflection in spite of its uproarious wit—the secret of this solemn jester, this conservative revolutionist, this religious atheist, this communistic defender of Attic aristocracy, is also the secret of Euripides. The time-spirit of individualism is in each; but the one accepts it as a blessing because he sees only the freedom of negative thinking, the other scorns and derides and hates it because his eagle glance foresees the destruction of old Athenian sympathies it must effect. But Aristophanes just as little as Euripides can live out of or above the new conditions of Athenian thought and action; he is a citizen not of his own Cuckoo-town, but of Athens with all its limitations of space and time.
It is, in fact, through the Aristophanic comedy that the Attic drama from Euripides onwards accompanies the development of social life at Athens. Tragedy had now run its course, and in the hands of men who disbelieved the myths and customary morals upon which it had been founded must have tended more and more to run into burlesque. In the lyrical tragedies of the æsthete Agathon; in the dramas in which Critias and Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, aired their speculations on political and social topics; in the plays of Chæremon, whose
