It is now the eighth year of the Peloponnesian War, in which all Greece is ranged on the side of the two great contending powers, Athens and Sparta. The great Pericles--to whose fatal policy, as Aristophanes held, its long continuance has been due--has been six years dead. His place in the commonwealth has been taken by men of inferior mark. And the man who is now most in popular favour, the head of the democratic interest, now completely in the ascendant, is the poet’s great enemy, Cleon: an able but unscrupulous man, of low origin, loud and violent, an able speaker and energetic politician. Historians are at variance as to his real claim to honesty and patriotism, and it remains a question never likely to be set at rest. It would be manifestly unfair to decide it solely on the evidence of his satirical enemy. He and his policy had been fiercely attacked in the first comedy produced by Aristophanes--‘The Babylonians,’ of which only the merest fragment has come down to us. But we know that in it the poet had satirised the abuses prevalent in the Athenian government, and their insolence to their subject-allies, under the disguise of an imaginary empire, the scene of which he laid in Babylon. Cleon had revenged himself upon his satirist by overwhelming him with abuse in the public assembly, and by making a formal accusation against him of having slandered the state in the presence of foreigners and aliens, and thus brought ridicule and contempt upon the commonwealth of Athens. In the drama now before us, the author is not only satirising the political weakness of his countrymen; he is fulfilling the threat which he had held out the year before in his ‘Acharnians,’--that he would “cut up Cleon the tanner into shoe-leather for the Knights,”--and concentrating the whole force of his wit, in the most unscrupulous and merciless fashion, against his personal enemy. In this bitterness of spirit the play stands in strong contrast with the good-humoured burlesque of ‘The Acharnians’ and ‘The Peace,’ or, indeed, with any other of the author’s productions which have reached us. This play follows the fashion of the Athenian stage in taking its name from the Chorus, who are in this case composed of THE KNIGHTS--the class of citizens ranking next to the highest at Athens. A more appropriate title, if the title is meant to indicate the subject, would be that which Mr Mitchell gives it in his translation--‘The Demagogues.’ The principal character in the piece is “Demus”--_i.e._, People: an impersonation of that many-headed monster the Commons of Athens, the classical prototype of Swift’s John Bull; and the satire is directed against the facility with which he allows himself to be gulled and managed by those who are nominally his servants but really his masters--those noisy and corrupt demagogues (and one in particular, just at present) who rule him for their own selfish ends.