TJie'Birds of Aristophanes. 15 cunning, and spirit, and rewarded by what all sympathize with, success. 5. "Euelpides is at once a representation of the giddy, san- guine youth of Athens, and of Polus of Agrigentum." It is, I apprehend, quite a novel idea, to represent sanguine youth in the form of a timorous old man, so novel indeed, that the audience must have been left completely in the dark. There is not one trait ascribed to Euelpides which confirms this asser- tion. Of Polus we know absolutely nothing, except that he is intro- duced with great comic effect in the Gorgias. Whether he were ever at Athens at all, and whether the Athenians of 414 B.C. had ever heard his name, we cannot say. Certainly, he was not da-ros /tier aarSv ; and indeed all the reasons which forbid us to suppose that Gorgias was meant by Peisthetaerus, tell a fortiori against the notion that Polus was meant by Euelpides. If there were the least ground for the former hypothesis, Philippus would be a much more probable conjecture for the famulus of Gorgias, than Polus. 6. " The Epops represents Lamachus." Siivern's reasons for this proposition resolve themselves into three : 1st, Lamachus has a large crest in the "Acharnians," and the Epops has a large crest in the " Birds." 2nd, Lamachus was poor, the Epops is moulting (103). 3rd, Lamachus could scarcely have been omitted in a play of which the Sicilian expedition was the object. Argument the first may well be left to fall by its own weight. No. 2 would have been more apposite if Lamachus had once been rich. The simile is applied below, with great propriety, to Callias. But for ought we know, Lamachus never had any fea- thers in this sense, and therefore could not lose them*. That he was poor is a well-established historical fact ; but Plutarch's am- plification, that when appointed general he had to charge the public a small sum els eadrjras Ka Kprjmdas iavTco, is probably a joke of some comic poet mistaken for a fact.
- The well-known passage in the before, the year 425. No reason why
Acharnians (614 sqq.), if taken as the he should be represented as "moulting" expression of a literal fact, only proves eleven years afterwards, that Lamachus had got into debt in, or
