popularity, in order to advance their own political claims, vied with each other in the liberality of their expenditure. But at the close of the Peloponnesian War, many a noble family found itself impoverished by the long and terrible struggle, and the competition for public office had probably lost much of its charm. The stage followed the temper of the nation: it became less violently political, less extravagant and more sedate. Shall one venture to say that, like the nation, it lost something of its spirit? There was method, we must remember, in the mad licence of Aristophanes. Bitter as he was against his political opponents, it was an honest bitterness, and Cleon was his enemy because he believed him to be the enemy of the state. Socrates and Euripides were caricatured in the most unsparing fashion, for the amusement of the audience, and it was convenient for a professional jester to have two such well-known characters for his subject; but he had always the apology that he really believed the teaching both of the philosopher and of the tragedian to have an evil influence upon public morality. There was a certain earnestness of purpose which gave respectability to the Aristophanic comedy in spite of its notorious offences against decency and good manners.
The new style of Comedy, which was the original of that of Plautus and Terence, and which developed in later times into what we call Comedy now, did not perhaps fully establish itself at Athens until nearly half a century after the death of Aristophanes. But the germ of it may be found in the later tragedies of Euripides. His heroes, and even his gods, are as unlike as possible to the stately figures who move in the dramas of
