But it was not the tragic drama alone that was inspired and made a preacher of righteousness: in the hands of Aristophanes, the comic drama exerted all its power for the same end. For over thirty years this inimitable humorist used the public theatre to lash the follies, and hold up to contempt the wretched leaders, of the Athenian populace, pointing out to his countrymen the abyss of destruction that was yawning before them. The world has never seen such earnest comedy, not even in the works of Molière or Beaumarchais. Yet it was all in vain. Long before his death, Aristophanes was forbidden to hold up to public scorn the degradation of his people. Among the individual citizens who labored with all their might to bring back Athens to her old worth were two of very different character, endowments, and position, the one laboring in the world of action, the other in the world of thought. The first was Pericles, who, seeing that democracy was the order of the day, accepted it, and, by his personal character and position, strove to guide it to worthy ends. In order to encourage gymnastic exercises, particularly among the sons of the newer families, he built the Lyceum, in a grove sacred to Apollo, between Cynosarges and the city walls, as a gymnasium for them. With a view to encouraging among them the study of music, he built an odeon, or music-hall, under the southeast end of the Acropolis. Both were magnificent structures. What he did towards the completion of the great theatre for the encouragement of dancing, we do not know; that this entered into his plan, there can hardly be any doubt. But Pericles was too wise a man to suppose that he could induce his pleasure-seeking countrymen to subject themselves to the old discipline, without offering them an object calculated to rouse their ambition and call forth their energy. This object was nothing less than a united Greece, with Athens as its capital. How hard he tried to make this object familiar to them, and to render Athens worthy of the place he desired her to occupy, is pathetically attested to this day by the Propylæa and the Parthenon. On the frieze of the latter is represented the solemn sacrifice that was to cement the union of the Hellenic people, and place it at the head of civilization. When degenerate Greece resisted all his efforts to make her become one peaceably, he tried to make her do so by force, and the Peloponnesian War, started on a mere frivolous pretext, was the result. He did not live long enough to learn the outcome of this desperate attempt to wake his countrymen to new moral and political life, and it was well. If he had, he might have been forced to recognize that he had been attempting an impossible task,--trying to erect a strong structure with rotten timber, to make a noble State out of ignoble, selfish men. Unfortunately, the example of his own private life, in which he openly defied one of the laws of the State, and tried to make concubinage