Belloc in public controversy
it is hard to say which makes the greater number of hits. Even harder is
it to say that the cause of truth has been much advanced. One may hold,
fairly enough, that both sides have been made ludicrous; but it is
still fairer to admit that neither has been utterly discredited. If
Aristophanes never succeeded in ruining a party, at least he succeeded
in discrediting some pestilent opinions. This he did, not so much by a
brisk display of intellectual handiness, as by showing that a pompous
superstructure was baseless. He makes us feel a position to be absurd,
instead of merely thinking certain things in it silly.

The superior, sneering official has not escaped shrewd knocks from the
wits of every age. There is a type of mind which, under every form of
government, pushes to the front by sheer lack of virtue. Wherever life
has become sufficiently mechanical to support a bureaucracy, there will
the Poloniuses and Shallows gather, and, wherever there is an official
caste, there will be satirists or torture-chambers.[12] Yet, though the
self-complacent magistrate has been the butt of the ages, Aristophanes
and Shakespeare, and perhaps Flaubert, have alone revealed his essential
nullity, because they alone have looked for something essential beneath
the accidental. Nothing could be simpler than the character of Polonius;
nothing could be more subtle. A rap here, a stab there, and the soul of
a minister is exposed. We have come to see, we scarcely know how, that,
if he ever had one, he has lost it. Some idea of the simplicity and
subtlety of the Aristophanic method may be gathered from the following
scene, but to illustrate the extravagance and beauty of the form, or the
profundity of the conception, no quotation can suffice. Lysistrata has
unfolded her famous scheme for stopping the war: there is to be a
sympathetic strike; the women of all the combatant states, principals
and allies, are to withhold their services until the war has been
stopped:

LYSISTRATA [_ending a speech_]. Then shall the people revere us and
honour us,
givers of Joy, and givers of Peace.

MAGISTRATE. Tell us the mode and the means of your doing it.

LYS. First we will stop the disorderly crew,
Soldiers in arms promenading and marketing.

STRATYLLIS [_leader of the chorus of women_]. Yea, by divine
Aphrodite, 'tis true.