humour. The main idea—the women strike in a body and refuse to have any dealings with men until peace is made—was capable of any kind of treatment; and the curious thing is that Aristophanes, while professing to ridicule the women, is all through on their side. The jokes made by the superior sex at the expense of the inferior—to give them their Roman names—are seldom remarkable either for generosity or for refinement. And it is our author's pleasant humour to accuse everybody of every vice he can think of at the moment. Yet with the single exception that he credits women with an inordinate fondness for wine-parties—the equivalent, it would seem, of afternoon tea—he makes them, on the whole, perceptibly more sensible and more 'sympathetic' than his men. Of course the emancipation of women was one of the ideas of the time. Aristophanes wrote two plays on the subject. Two other comedians, Amphis and Alexis, wrote one each, and that before Plato had made his famous pronouncement, or the Cynics started their women-preachers. It was an instinct in Aristophanes to notice and superficially to assimilate most of the advanced thought of his time; if he had gone deeper, he would have taken things seriously and spoilt his work. He always turns back before he has understood too much, and uses his half-knowledge and partial sympathy to improve his mocking.
The Thesmophoriazusæ, written in the same year and under the same difficulties, is a very clever play. The women assembled at the feast of Thesmophoria, to which no men were admitted, take counsel together how to have revenge on Euripides for representing such 'horrid' women in his tragedies. Euripides knows of the plan, and persuades his father-in-law to go to the
