Monumentum ære perenuius, Quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens Aunorum series, et fuga temporum. It is not merely great events, it is not the recital of great actions, which produce interest, for if they are continued without intern.ission, there is nothing more apt to become cold and tiresome. The poet must not only appeal to the understanding and amuse the mind, but he must touch the feelings. Nothing gains a poet greater admiration than tender and pathetic scenes. There are some passages of this nature interspersed through Homer and Virgil. Milton has a greater number, but Ossian surpasses all his rivals. His tenderness is his strongest recommendation. But the tenderness of his sentiments is not his only beauty. The chasteness and delicacy, with which he expresses every idea, touch the fibres of the heart, and vibrate through every nerve. We catch the fire of his warriors, we are warmed by the friendship of his heroes, we sigh in the tender strains of his lovers, and we drop a tear of pleasing sorrow over the grave of his departed. Edinb. 12 Dec. 1815. LENNOX. ON THE CLOUDS OF ARISTOPHANES. BY PROFESSOR VOSS OF HEIDELBERG. THE Comedy of the Clouds was produced in an age when the schools of philosophy at Athens, abandoned by teachers of reputation, were under the direction of young and incompetent masters; and quibbling sophists promoted the decline of public morals. The poet shows how by the spurious philosophy of fashionable preceptors, the strength and simplicity of the noble age of Marathon were degenerating into effeminate voluptuousness; and the presumptuous disputations of mob-orators among a raw populace were confounding right and wrong and unsettling the foundations of virtue and religion. In order to combat this dangerous sophistry from the stage, the poet could not dispense with the name of a known character. But why, it may be asked, did he select that of Socrates, the genuine philosopher, whom ignorance and malignity alone could charge with the offences of those sophists whose declared enemy he was? The tale that Aristophanes was bribed by Anytus, and Melitus, who three and twenty years afterwards accused Socrates of a capital offence, is sufficiently answered by a reference to the great distance of time between those events. As little was Aristophanes stimulated by enmity or even revenge against Socrates, because, as Elian and others assert, he had seduced the audience from the comedies of the day. We ascertain the respect which Socrates bore for Comedy in the symposium of Plato, in which Socrates urges Aristophanes and Agathon to admit that it belongs to the same poet to write Tragedies and Comedies, and that the art of composing both, is one and the same art; a doctrine which Shakespeare has triumphantly demonstrated. In the symposium we learn that a friendly intercourse subsisted between the poet and the philosopher; and how innocent Aristophanes must have appeared to the friends of Socrates is evident from several circumstances. Xenophon repeatedly mentions Aristophanes without any intimation of dislike; and Plato's celebrated epigram imports that the Graces, seeking an imperishable abode, chose the breast of Aristophanes. We know also that Plato sent the Clouds to king Dionysius, as conveying the best account of the state of Athens; and that he died in advanced years with his head resting on the works of the great poet. What therefore has been remarked by some Scholiasts concerning the natural antipathy between comic poets and philosophers is at least inapplicable to Aristophanes and Socrates. And the Scholiast judges better who says, that the poet had brought the philosopher on the stage without any bitterness. It was just such a man, respected in Athens as a most acute thinker and of unblemished reputation, who could afford to abandon his name and person to the poet, that in them might be exposed the useless and pernicious subtleties of the age. His established celebrity protected him from being confounded with the farcical copy. He, who with playful humour ventures to hold up an upright, generous, and intelligent man as a liar, miser, and fool, does not offend. An altogether inapplicable reproach is praise, as undeserved praise is censure. The gay Athenians understood jesting, and that so thoroughly, that they could see the sublime Dionysus himself, the inspirer of the drama, exhibited in a ludicrous caricature without withdrawing their reverence from him. Neither Secrates nor any other philosophical leader is treated in this piece with that serious hostility, with which in the Knights he has pursued the mighty and dangerous Cleon. There was no individual Sophist of importance enough to be the object of attack. It was the whole system of sophistry, in which every one bore a part, that was to be overturned. Now as a num◄ ber of these spurious philosophers affected not merely the subtle manner, but also the rigid morals, of Socrates, or as it is called in the Birds v. 128.socratised, the poet gave a personality to this socratising, and created a sham Socrates, in whom only certain striking features of the inimitable original were farcically represented. We may imagine Kantranism, Pestalozzism, or any other ism of our age and country, personified in an individual, on whose head the imputed folly and wickedness of all the disciples, and at the same time the actual peculiarities of the pretended master, may be exhibited in caricature. It is in this way that Aristophanes has in his socratising buffoon caricatured certain remarkable peculiarities of the genuine Socrates, as, step, gesture, dress, manners, (v. 104. 361. 414.) similies taken from ordinary life (v. 235); his images from midwifery, his mode of instruction, (696. and 737.) his insisting on precision, (v. 1180) his love of jesting, (v. 146) his predilection for Euripides, the corrupter of morals, (v. 1373.) who is perhaps of tener aimed at than can now be conjectured; his indulgence towards the fanatical Charephon (105.). In other respects, the poet passes over rich materials for satire, in the habits of Socrates, viz. his convulsions, his belief in a warning dæmon, his fatherly love of beautiful young men, his mode of entangling disputants in contradiction by questions, &c. Aud on the other hand he ascribes to him what appertained to others, as v. 115. the art of Protagoras of turning right to wrong; v. 379. the doctrine of Empedocles of the etherial vortex, the scholastic language of Pythagoras: v.824. the rashness of the Atheist Diagoras; v.403. the fancies of certain natural philosophers. Socrates is represented v. 199. as the gloomy enemy of athletic exercises in the open air, though Plato in his symposium praises his skill in wrestling, and Alcibiades in the same dialogue celebrates with glowing enthusiasm his well known fortitude in the endurance of all the fatigues of war. The Socrates of the fable, like the mercenary sophists, actually keeps school for hard cash (v. 99.) while the real Socrates was seldom in his own house, (Xenophon's Memorabilia) and gave his instructions without compensation; and, which exceeds every thing else, he is made (v. 497.) to take shoes and clothes from new comers, and (v. 179.) steal a cloak in order to provide a supper for his pupils. And thus Socrates, who in his 71st year died the wisest and uprightest of the Grecians, was in about his 50th year to pass for a crazy and impudent swindler! What mind can understand, what heart can endure such an absurdity? Though noble characters but gradually ripen into excellence, no man ever became a Socrates after having been the very contrary character. Certainly in Athens, where the philosopher was familiarly known, and where the dissimilarity between him and his caricature must have been perceived even from many features which 1 history has not delivered down to us, Aristophanes, who has in the Wasps, (v. 64.) celebrated the discernment of his audience, could not suppose that they would be capable of confounding the caricature with the original. This was the opinion of Socrates himself, who, contrary to his practice, was on this occasion present at the representation of the comedy; and, as credible witnesses relate, looked on with such composure, that, when he was asked by some friends whether he was not offended by such abuse, he smiled and said that he felt as he should do at the raillery of friends at a convivial party. And long afterwards in his defence, he was secure from contradiction when he asserted that he bore no part in the follies of the Socrates of Aristophanes. The acute and candid Lessing is therefore fully warranted in what he asserted in the 91st. No. of the Hamburg Dramaturgie, in answer to his friend Mendelsohn, who, in his preface to the translation of Phædon, had reproached the satirist, that the object of the poet's attack was the dangerous sophist. And he called him Socrates, merely because Socrates had been considered as such. Hence proceeded the many strokes which altogether missed the real Socrates; so that the philosopher did not scruple to stand up in the theatre and present himself to a comparison. But they greatly mistake the essence of comedy, who declare these strokes which did not hit to be mere wanten calumnies, and do not perceive them to be generalizations of individual character. The piece did not receive the applause which was expected. It was beaten by the Wine-flask of Cratinus and the Konnos of Amipsias. Aristophanes had on this occasion, as he intimates in the Wasps v. 64, expected too much from the discernment of the Athenians. It is true, he had taken sufficient care that the real Socrates should not be confounded with the hero of his comedy; but the greater part of the spectators had little pleasure in the learned gravity of the subject, more particularly as they had already the merry Wine-flask of the aged Cratinus. Many too in Athens were by no means unfavorable to the sophistical Rhetoricians; for there were great numbers who affected eloquence, and these could not but consider the ridicule as too strong, and even flippant. Others, whose vanity had been mortified by Socrates, were not pleased by the exhibition of a sham Socrates, who in fact displayed more prominently the excellences of the original. Many, who agreed with the poet in the object of his satire, were yet weak enough to take offence at the giving of the name and person of so wise a character to a caricature personification of false philosophy. These various unfavorable circumstances conspired to enable a swarm of opponents to rouse against the comedy the people of Athens, who were always so easily excitable. That Alcibiades, as the Scholiast asserts, was the leader of this party, is not improbable; for this ambitious young man, then of the age of 25, had been two years before attacked by Aristophanes as a seditious orator. And it is likely that he would not let slip such an opportunity of revenge. And so it happened, as Aristophanes complains in the Wasps, 1057, that the poet lost the valuable fruits of his inventions, the sense of which the Athenians did not distinctly understand. Whether he ever brought his piece on the stage afterwards; or, he did, whether in the same or in an altered shape, is not exactly known. That he wished it, is proved by the address to the spectators, (v. 511. 555.) which, as Hermann shows, could not have been written before the 4th year of the 89th Olympiad, that is three years after the performance, or perhaps later, and only inserted afterwards in the manuscript. if MOTS OU OMIS PAR H. ETIENNE, Pár J. B. GAIL, Lecteur Royal et Conservateur des Manuscrits No. V. [Continued from No. XXVI. p. 406.] 58. yngáw, yngźoxw, sont ils synonymes? oui, repondent H. Et. et autres. Pour moi je croirois que yngaw signifie être dans la vieillesse, et yngάoxe, entrer dans la vieillesse. Ainsi, dans Xenophon K. 12, 1, je traduirois, les chasseurs auront la vue meilleure et l'oreille plus sensible et feront des pas moins rapides et en la decrepitude, γηράσκειν ἧττον. 39. Té. Dans mon N. II. (Class. Journ. xxiv. p. 465.) je fais sur ce verbe une remarque utile, je crois. J'aurois du ajouter qu'en Grec, les verbes qui disent venir, disent aussi arriver, être présent, et par extension secourir. 40. valeta oxa. Importante obs. sur les verbes en oxw. De grands critiques et d'illustres lexicographes me semblent souvent ignorer ou beaucoup trop negliger le sens des verbes en σxw. Les uns jugent les verbes en σx ou sσx synonymes de leurs primitifs : les autres, comme Portus, y voyent des formes poétiques, ou des Ionismes, comme Robertson. Autant d'inexactitudes qu'il importe de relever, mais je ne puis que les signaler. Apollonius de Rhodes (Argon. 1.68.) dit en parlant d'Eurydamus fils de Ctiménus, ἄγχι λίμνης Ξυνιάδος Κτιμένην Δολοπηΐδα ναιετάασκε. |