ion, or bold
metaphor: as for example, the procuring of a private peace for a citizen
who is weary of the privations of war; or the establishment of a city in
Cloud-Cuckoo-Land where the birds shall regulate things better than the
featherless biped, man; or the restoration of the eyesight of the
proverbially blind god of Wealth. The attention of the audience is at
once enlisted for the semblance of a plot by which the scheme is put
into execution. The design once effected, the remainder of the play is
given over to a series of loosely connected scenes, ascending to a
climax of absurdity, in which the consequences of the original happy
thought are followed out with a Swiftian verisimilitude of piquant
detail and a Rabelaisian license of uproarious mirth. It rests with the
audience to take the whole as pure extravaganza, or as a _reductio ad
absurdum_ or playful defense of the conception underlying the original
idea. In the intervals between the scenes, the chorus sing rollicking
topical songs or bits of exquisite lyric, or in the name of the poet
directly exhort and admonish the audience in the so-called Parabasis.

Of Aristophanes's first two plays, the 'Banqueters of Hercules' (427),
and the 'Babylonians' (426), only fragments remain. The impolitic
representation in the latter of the Athenian allies as branded
Babylonian slaves was the ground of Cleon's attack in the courts upon
Aristophanes, or Callistratus in whose name the play was produced.

The extant plays are the following:--

'The Acharnians,' B.C. 425, shortly after the Athenian defeat
at Delium. The worthy countryman, Dicaeopolis, weary of being
cooped up within the Long Walls, and disgusted with the
shameless jobbery of the politicians, sends to Sparta for
samples of peace (the Greek word means also libations) of
different vintages. The Thirty Years' brand smells of nectar
and ambrosia. He accepts it, concludes a private treaty for
himself and friends, and proceeds to celebrate the rural
Dionysia with wife and child, soothing, by an eloquent plea
pronounced in tattered tragic vestments borrowed from
Euripides, the anger of the chorus of choleric Acharnian
charcoal burners, exasperated at the repeated devastation of
their deme by the Spartans. He then opens a market, to which
a jolly Boeotian brings the long-lost, thrice-desired Copaic
eel; while a starveling Megarian, to the huge d