to have attacked some individual,[70] by
Phrynichus, Plato and others; but the representative of old comedy in
its fullest development is Aristophanes (c. 444-c. 380), a comic poet of
unique and unsurpassed genius. Dignified by the acquisition of a chorus
(more numerous--twenty-four to twelve or afterwards fifteen--though of a
less costly kind than the tragic) of masked actors, and of scenery and
machinery, as well as by a corresponding literary elaboration and
elegance of style, Old Attic comedy nevertheless remained true both to
its origin and to the purposes of its introduction into the free
imperial city. Its special season was at the festival of the Lenaea,
when the Athenians could enjoy the fun against one another without
espying strangers; but it was also performed at the Great Dionysia. It
borrowed much from tragedy, but it retained the phallic abandonment of
the old rural festivals, the licence of word and gesture, and the
audacious directness of personal invective. These characteristics are
not features peculiar to Aristophanes. He was twitted by some of the
older comic poets with having degenerated from the full freedom of the
art by a tendency to refinement, and he took credit to himself for
having superseded the time-honoured _cancan_ and the stale practical
joking of his predecessors by a nobler kind of mirth. But in daring, as
he likewise boasted, he had no peer; and the shafts of his wit, though
dipped in wine-lees and at times feathered from very obscene fowl, flew
at high game.[71] He has been accused of seeking to degrade what he
ought to have recognized as good[72]; and it has been shown with
complete success that he is not to be taken as an impartial or accurate
authority on Athenian history. But partisan as he was, he was also a
genuine patriot; and his very political sympathies--which were
conservative, like those of the comic poets in general, not only because
it was the old families upon whom the expense of the _choregia_ in the
main devolved--were such as have often stimulated the most effective
political satire. Of the conservative quality of reverence he was,
however, altogether devoid; and his love for Athens was that of the most
free-spoken of sons. Flexible even in his religious notions, he was, in
this as in other respects, ready to be educated by his times; and, like
a true comic poet, he could be witty at the expense even of his friends,
and, it might almost be said, of himself. In wealt