8, and
there is no evidence that he long survived this date. Little is known of
his life beyond the allusions, in the Parabases of the 'Acharnians,'
'Knights,' and 'Wasps,' to his prosecution by Cleon, to his own or his
father's estate at Aegina, and to his premature baldness. He left three
sons who also wrote comedies.

Aristophanes is the sole extant representative of the so-called Old
Comedy of Athens; a form of dramatic art which developed obscurely under
the shadow of Attic Tragedy in the first half of the fifth century B.C.,
out of the rustic revelry of the Phallic procession and Comus song of
Dionysus, perhaps with some outside suggestions from the Megarian farce
and its Sicilian offshoot, the mythological court comedy of Epicharmus.
The chief note of this older comedy for the ancient critics was its
unbridled license of direct personal satire and invective. Eupolis,
Cratinus, and Aristophanes, says Horace, assailed with the utmost
freedom any one who deserved to be branded with infamy. This old
political Comedy was succeeded in the calmer times that followed the
Peloponnesian War by the so-called Middle Comedy (390-320) of Alexis,
Antiphanes, Strattis, and some minor men; which insensibly passed into
the New Comedy (320-250) of Menander and Philemon, known to us in the
reproductions of Terence. And this new comedy, which portrayed types of
private life instead of satirizing noted persons by name, and which, as
Aristotle says, produced laughter by innuendo rather than by scurrility,
was preferred to the "terrible graces" of her elder sister by the gentle
and refined Plutarch, or the critic who has usurped his name in the
'Comparison of Aristophanes and Menander.' The old Attic Comedy has been
variously compared to Charivari, Punch, the comic opera of Offenbach,
and a Parisian 'revue de fin d'annee.' There is no good modern analogue.
It is not our comedy of manners, plot, and situation; nor yet is it mere
buffoonery. It is a peculiar mixture of broad political, social, and
literary satire, and polemical discussion of large ideas, with the
burlesque and licentious extravagances that were deemed the most
acceptable service at the festival of the laughter-loving,
tongue-loosening god of the vine.

[Illustration: ARISTOPHANES]

The typical plan of an Aristophanic comedy is very simple. The
protagonist undertakes in all apparent seriousness to give a local
habitation and a body to some ingenious fancy, airy speculat