, and we read that there was a
certain ventriloquist named Eurycles; but Aristophanes must be content
to bear the reproach of having been the first to introduce punning. He
probably had accomplices among his contemporaries, but they have been
lost in obscurity. Playing with words seems to have commenced very
early. The organs of speech are not able to produce any great number of
entirely different sounds, as is proved by the paucity of the vowels and
consonants we possess. To increase the vocabulary, syllables are grouped
together by rapid utterance, and distinctions of time were made.
Similarities in the length and flow of words began soon to be noticed,
and hence arose the idea of parallelism, that is of poetry--a similarity
of measure. A likeness in the tone of words, in the vowel and consonant
sounds, was afterwards observed, and became the foundation of punning.
The difference between rhythm and puns is partly that of degree--and the
latter were originally regarded as poetical. Simonides of Ceos called
Jupiter Aristarchus, _i.e._, the best of rulers; and AEschylus spoke of
Helen as a "hell,"[13] but neither of them intended to be facetious.
Aristotle ranked such conceits among the ornaments of style; and we do
not until much later times find them regarded as ludicrous.

With Aristophanes they are humorous, and his ingenuity in representing
things as the same because their names were so, would not have been
unworthy of a modern burlesque writer. They, perhaps, were more
appreciated at that time from their appearing less common and less
easily made. But there is a worse direction than any above mentioned, in
which Aristophanes truckled to the low taste of his day. The modern
reader is shocked and astounded at the immense amount of indelicacy
contained in his works. It ranges from the mild impropriety of saying
that a girl dances as nimbly as a flea in a sheepskin, or of naming
those other industrious little creatures he euphemistically calls
"Corinthians," to a grand exhibition of the blessings of Peace under the
form of a young lady, the liberal display of whose charms would have
petrified a modern Chamberlain. In one place, Trygaeus is riding to
heaven on a dung-beetle, and of course a large fund of amusement is
obtained from the literal and metaphorical manipulation of its food.
Socrates' disciples are discovered in a kneeling posture, with their
heads on the ground. "What are they doing?" inquires the visitor. "Th