more especially when the cause to be decided is, as it so often was at Athens, of a public character. Plato considered that a citizen who took no interest in these duties made himself a kind of alien in the state, and we Englishmen hold very much the same doctrine. But the passion for hearing and deciding questions, judicial or political, was carried to great excess among the Athenians at this date. Their own historians and orators are full of references to this national peculiarity, and Aristophanes is not the only satirist who has taken advantage of it. Lucian, in one of his very amusing dialogues, represents Menippus as looking down from the moon upon the earth below, and watching the various pursuits of the inhabitants. The northern hordes are fighting, the Egyptian is ploughing, the Phœnician is carrying his merchandise over the sea, the Spartan is undergoing corporal discipline, and the Athenian is “sitting in the jury-box.”[39] This is perhaps the least amusing of all Aristophanes’s productions to a modern reader, although it was adopted by Racine as the basis of his only comedy, “Les Plaideurs.” There are but two characters in it of any importance to the action, a father and son. Philocleon,[40] the father, is strongly possessed with this mania for the courts. His family cannot keep him at home. He neglects his person, hardly sleeps at night for thinking of his duties in the courts, and is off before daylight in the morning to secure a good seat; he even declares the cock must have been bribed, by some profligates who have reason to dread the terrors of the law, not to crow loud enough to awake him. He keeps in his house “a whole beach” of little round pebbles, that he may always have one ready for giving his vote; and goes about holding his three fingers pinched together as if he had got one between them ready to slip into the ballot-box. In vain has his son remonstrated, and had him washed and dressed, and sent for the physicians, and even the priests, to try to rid him of his malady. And now, as a last resource, they have been obliged to lock him up, and set a watch upon the house. His contrivances to escape are in the very wildest vein of extravaganza. He tries to get out through the chimney, and pretends he’s “only the smoke;” and they all rush to put a cover on the chimney-top, and a great stone on it. He escapes through a hole in the tiles and sits on the roof, pretending to be “only a sparrow;” and they have to set a net to catch him. His son--a young gentleman of the more modern school--and the two slaves who are set to watch him day and night, have a very trying time of it.