The extreme licence of personal attack which was accorded by general consent to the writers of comedy, so that any man whose character and habits were at all before the public might find himself at any moment held up to popular ridicule upon the stage, will be the subject of remark hereafter. It must have been very unpleasant and embarrassing, one must suppose, to the individuals thus marked out; but the sacredness of private life and character was something unknown to an Athenian, and he would not be nearly so sensitive on these points as ourselves. The very fact that this licence was allowed to exist so long is some proof that it was on the whole not unfairly exercised. The satiric writer must have felt that his popularity depended upon his aiming his blows only where the popular feeling held them to be well deserved; and there are some follies and vices which this kind of castigation can best reach, and cases of public shamelessness or corruption which, under a lax code of morality, can only be fitly punished by public ridicule. When, towards the close of the great struggle between Athens and Sparta, the executive powers of the State had been usurped by the oligarchy of the “Four Hundred,” a law was passed to prohibit, under strong penalties, the introduction of real persons into these satiric dramas: but the check thus put to the right of popular criticism upon public men and measures was only a token of the decline of Athenian liberty. The free speech of comedy was in that commonwealth what the freedom of the press is in our own; and, in both cases, the risk of its occasional abuse was not so dangerous as its suppression.