But there could be no greater mistake than to suppose that the audience before whom these plays of Aristophanes were represented were impressible only by these lower influences. It has just been said that education at Athens was widely spread. Readers, indeed, might not be many, when books were necessarily so few; but the education which was received by the masses through their constant attendance at the theatre, the public deliberative assembly, and the law-courts, was quite as effective in sharpening their intelligence and their memory. Fully to realise to ourselves what Greek intellect was in the bright days of Athens, and to understand how well that city deserved her claim to be the intellectual “eye of Greece,” we should not appeal to the works of her great poets, her historians, or her orators, which may be assumed (though scarcely in the case of the tragedians) to have depended for their due appreciation upon the finer tastes of the few: we must turn to these comedies, addressed directly to an audience in which, although those finer tastes were not unrepresented, the verdict of what we should call the “masses” was essential to the author’s success. There is abundant evidence in these pieces--it is impressed upon the reader disagreeably in every one of them--that, willingly or unwillingly, the writer pandered to the vulgar taste, and degraded his Muse to the level of the streets in order to catch this popular favour; though not without occasional protests in his own defence against such perversion of his art--protests which we must fear were only half sincere. But there is evidence quite as conclusive that the intellectual calibre, and even the literary taste, of this audience was of a far higher character than that of the modern pit and gallery. The dramatist not only assumes on their behalf a familiarity with all the best scenes and points in the dramas of the great tragedians--which, in the case of such inveterate play-goers as the Athenians were, is not so very surprising--and an acquaintance with the political questions and the public celebrities of the day which possibly might be found, in this age when every man is becoming a politician, amongst a Paris or a London theatrical auditory; but he also expects to find, and evidently did find, an acquaintance with, and an appreciation of, poetry generally, a comprehension of at least the salient points of different systems of philosophy, and an ability to seize at once and appropriate all the finer points of allusion, of parody, and of satire. Aristophanes is quite aware of the weaknesses and the wilfulness of this many-headed multitude, whom he satirises so unsparingly to their faces; but he had good right to say of them, as he does in his ‘Knights,’ that they were an audience with whom he might make sure at least of being understood,--“For our friends here are sharp enough.”[5]