Something must be said of the personal history of our author himself, though such biographical account of him as we have is more or less apocryphal. He was no doubt a free citizen of Athens, because when the great popular demagogue Cleon, whom he had so bitterly satirised on the stage, took his revenge by an attempt to prove the contrary in a court of law, he failed in his purpose. Aristophanes was also probably a man of some wealth, since he had property, as he tells us in one of his plays, in the island of Ægina. In politics and in social questions he was a stanch Conservative; proud of the old days of Athenian greatness, jealous of the new habits and fashions which he thought tended to enervate the youth of the state, and the new systems of philosophy which were sapping the foundations of morality and honesty. His conservatism tended perhaps to the extreme, or at least takes that appearance in the exaggeration natural to the comic satirist; for he certainly appears occasionally as the champion of a pre-scientific age, when gymnastics held a higher place in education than philosophy, and when the stout Athenian who manned the galleys at Salamis thought he knew enough if he “knew how to ask for barley-cake, and shout his yo-heave-oh!”[7] He was as much of an aristocrat as a man might be, to be an Athenian: he hated the mob-orators of his time, not only for their principles but for their vulgar origin, with an intensity which he did not care to disguise, and which, had not his wit and his boldness made him a popular favourite, rather in spite of his opinions than because of them, would have brought him into even more trouble than it actually did. He began to write for the stage at a very early age--so early, that he was not allowed by law to produce his two first pieces (now unfortunately lost) in his own name. Some of the old commentators would have us believe that he wrote his first comedy when he was only eighteen, but this, from internal evidence, seems improbable; he must have been five or six years older. He supplied the dramatic festivals with comedies, more or less successful, for at least thirty-seven years (from B.C. 427 to 390); but of the forty plays which he is known to have produced we have only eleven, and some of them in a more or less imperfect form. For the preservation of these, according to ancient tradition, we are indebted to one who might have seemed a very unlikely patron for this kind of pagan literature--no other than St John Chrysostom. That worthy father of the Church is said to have slept with a manuscript of Aristophanes under his pillow; it is at least certain that he had studied his plays and admired them, since he has not unfrequently imitated their language in his own writings.