elight of the
Athenian groundlings, sells his little daughters, disguised
as pigs, for a peck of salt. Finally Dicaeopolis goes forth to
a wedding banquet, from which he returns very mellow in the
company of two flute girls; while Lamachus, the head of the
war party, issues forth to do battle with the Boeotians in
the snow, and comes back with a bloody coxcomb. This play was
successfully given in Greek by the students of the University
of Pennsylvania in the spring of 1886, and interestingly
discussed in the Nation of May 6th by Professor Gildersleeve.

'The Knights,' B.C. 424: named from the chorus of young Athenian
cavaliers who abet the sausage-seller, Agoracritus, egged on by the
discontented family servants (the generals), Nicias and Demosthenes, to
outbid with shameless flattery the rascally Paphlagonian steward, Cleon,
and supplant him in the favor of their testy bean-fed old master, Demos
(or People). At the close, Demos recovers his wits and his youth, and is
revealed sitting enthroned in his glory in the good old Marathonian
Athens of the Violet Crown. The prolongation of the billingsgate in the
contest between Cleon and the sausage-seller grows wearisome to modern
taste; but the portrait of the Demagogue is for all time.

'The Clouds,' B.C. 423: an attack on Socrates, unfairly taken as an
embodiment of the deleterious and unsettling "new learning," both in the
form of Sophistical rhetoric and "meteorological" speculation. Worthy
Strepsiades, eager to find a new way to pay the debts in which the
extravagance of his horse-racing son Pheidippides has involved him,
seeks to enter the youth as a student in the Thinking-shop or Reflectory
of Socrates, that he may learn to make the worse appear the better
reason, and so baffle his creditors before a jury. The young man, after
much demur and the ludicrous failure of his father, who at first
matriculates in his stead, consents. He listens to the pleas of the just
and unjust argument in behalf of the old and new education, and becomes
himself such a proficient that he demonstrates, in flawless reasoning,
that Euripides is a better poet than Aeschylus, and that a boy is
justified in beating his father for affirming the contrary. Strepsiades
thereupon, cured of his folly, undertakes a subtle investigation into
the timbers of the roof of the Reflectory, with a view to smoking out
the corrupters of youth. Many of the songs sung