nything else.
Frankly "pacificist," and to some extent "feminist," hostile, at any
rate, to arrogant virility, it sounds in its ideas and arguments oddly
familiar to modern ears; and, in the interest of those ears, it may be
worth pausing a moment to consider the circumstances in which it was
produced.

Some eighteen months earlier--towards the end of 413 B.C.--had come news
of the most stunning disaster that was to befall Athens till the final
catastrophe at Aegospotami. The greatest armament ever assembled by a
Greek state had been annihilated, literally, before Syracuse: the city,
itself, was in danger. For that not the less was Aristophanes permitted
to produce in the state theatre at the public cost his fiercely
anti-militarist and anti-imperialist play. Was it the best, or one of
the two or three best, comedies of the year? That was what the Athenians
wanted to know. If it was, of course it ought to be presented.

During this long and horrible war (it lasted twenty-eight years), power,
as was to be expected, slipped into the hands of vile and violent
demagogues, of men who by rhetoric and intrigue induced the people more
than once to reject on fair occasions reasonable terms, who in 420,
guided by Alcibiades, contrived by an infamous stratagem to upset the
Peace of Nicias, and by a combination of evil motives--private interest,
public vanity, vindictiveness, greed, and sentimentality--prolonged the
war until it ended in the ruin of the city and the irreparable
debasement of ancient civilization. These men, as may be supposed, were
the butts of our poet's bitterest satire and most furious invective. Yet
even they, though incessantly attacked and exposed, never succeeded in
prohibiting, and perhaps never wished to prohibit, the performance of
his plays.

It has been said that Athens attempted to impose her civilization on the
Hellenic world and became barbarous in the attempt. There is, of course,
much truth in this. To wage war successfully a state must make itself to
some extent barbarous; and the Peloponnesian War ended the progressive
phase of Greek culture. The state conquered by Rome was something
unrecognizably inferior to the state that Pericles so recklessly
jeopardized; and it is interesting to note that the conquest of Greece
by Rome did far more for the spread of Greek civilization and culture
than any of those projects of aggrandizement and expansion so artfully
devised by Athenian imperialists. No r