so-called referential or sentimental swearing. Dicaeopolis invokes
Ecbatana when Shamartabas struts upon the stage. Socrates in the
'Clouds' swears by the everlasting vapors. King Hoopoe's favorite oath
is "Odds nets and birdlime." And the vein of humor that lies in
over-ingenious, elaborate, and sustained metaphor was first worked in
these comedies. All these excellences are summed up in the incomparable
wealth and flexibility of his vocabulary. He has a Shakespearean mastery
of the technicalities of every art and mystery, an appalling command of
billingsgate and of the language of the cuisine, and would tire Falstaff
and Prince Hal with base comparisons. And not content with the existing
resources of the Greek vocabulary, he coins grotesque or beautiful
compounds,--exquisite epithets like "Botruodoere" (bestower of the
vine), "heliomanes" (drunk-with-sunlight), "myriad-flagoned
phrases," untranslatable "port-manteaus" like "plouthugieia"
(health-and-wealthfulness), and Gargantuan agglomerations of syllables
like the portentous _olla podrida_ at the end of the 'Ecclesiazusae.'

The great comic writer, as the example of Moliere proves, need not be a
poet. But the mere overflow of careless poetic power which is
manifested by Aristophanes would have sufficed to set up any ordinary
tragedian or lyrist. In plastic mastery of language only two Greek
writers can vie with him, Plato and Homer. In the easy grace and native
harmony of his verse he outsings all the tragedians, even that Aeschylus
whom he praised as the man who had written the most exquisite songs of
any poet of the time. In his blank verse he easily strikes every note,
from that of the urbane, unaffected, colloquial Attic, to parody of high
or subtle tragic diction hardly distinguishable from its model. He can
adapt his metres to the expression of every shade of feeling. He has
short, snapping, fiery trochees, like sparks from their own holm oak, to
represent the choler of the Acharnians; eager, joyous glyconics to
bundle up a sycophant and hustle him off the stage, or for the young
knights of Athens celebrating Phormio's sea fights, and chanting,
horse-taming Poseidon, Pallas, guardian of the State, and Victory,
companion of the dance; the quickstep march of the trochaic tetrameter
to tell how the Attic wasps, true children of the soil, charged the
Persians at Marathon; and above all--the chosen vehicle of his wildest
conceits, his most audacious fancies, and his