This very lively comedy, the humour of which is still so intelligible, seems to have supplied the original idea for those modern burlesques upon the Olympian and Tartarian deities which were at one time so popular. For some reason it was not brought out in the author’s own name; but it gained the first prize, and was acted a second time, probably in the same year--an honour, strange to say, very unusual at Athens. CHAPTER VIII. THE WOMEN’S FESTIVAL.--THE ECCLESIAZUSÆ. The ‘Thesmophoriazusæ,’ as this piece is called in the Greek, is a comedy in which, as in the ‘Lysistrata,’ the fair sex play the chief part, although its whole point lies in a satire (though scarcely so severe as that in ‘The Frogs’) upon Euripides, whom our author was never tired of holding up to ridicule. The secret history of this literary quarrel we shall never know; if indeed there was really any quarrel which could have a history, and if the unceasing jests which Aristophanes dealt out in this and other comedies against his brother dramatist were not mainly prompted by the fact that his tragedies were highly popular, universally known and quoted, and therefore an excellent subject for the caricature and parody which were the essence of this style of comedy. It has been remarked that the conservative principles of the comic author are supposed to have been scandalised by the new-fashioned ideas of the tragedian: but the shafts of his ridicule are directed much more frequently against the plots and versification of Euripides’s plays than against his philosophy.[50]