to vary an air of music was a
crime--not the Dorians of Lacedaemon--but of Megara and Syracuse--of
an energetic, though irregular democracy--of a splendid, though
illegitimate monarchy. [326]

But the comedy of Epicharmus was not altogether the old comedy of
Athens. The last, as bequeathed to us by Aristophanes, has features
which bear little family resemblance to the philosophical parodies of
the Pythagorean poet. It does not confine itself to mythological
subjects--it avoids the sententious style--it does not preach, but
ridicule philosophy--it plunges amid the great practical business of
men--it breathes of the Agora and the Piraeus--it is not a laughing
sage, but a bold, boisterous, gigantic demagogue, ever in the thickest
mob of human interests, and wielding all the various humours of a
democracy with a brilliant audacity, and that reckless ease which is
the proof of its astonishing power.

IX. Chionides was the first Athenian comic writer. We find him
before the public three years after the battle of Marathon (B. C.
487), when the final defeat of Hippias confirmed the stability of the
republic; and when the improvements of Aeschylus in tragedy served to
communicate new attractions to the comic stage. Magnes, a writer of
great wit, and long popular, closely followed, and the titles of some
of the plays of these writers confirm the belief that Attic comedy,
from its commencement, took other ground than that occupied by the
mythological burlesques of Epicharmus. So great was the impetus given
to the new art, that a crowd of writers followed simultaneously, whose
very names it is wearisome to mention. Of these the most eminent were
Cratinus and Crates. The earliest _recorded_ play of Cratinus, though
he must have exhibited many before [327], appeared the year prior to
the death of Cimon (the Archilochi, B. C. 448). Plutarch quotes some
lines from this author, which allude to the liberality of Cimon with
something of that patron-loving spirit which was rather the
characteristic of a Roman than an Athenian poet. Though he himself,
despite his age, was proverbially of no very abstemious or decorous
habits, Cratinus was unsparing in his attacks upon others, and
wherever he found or suspected vice, he saw a subject worthy of his
genius. He was admired to late posterity, and by Roman critics, for
the grace and even for the grandeur of his hardy verses; and
Quintilian couples him with Eupolis and Aristophanes a