Even the gods were not slighted by the comic poets. The gourmand Hercules devours as fast as the cook can prepare victuals; Prometheus is protected from the elements by an umbrella; Bacchus swaggers as a fop and coward. Comedy in the hands of Aristophanes and his contemporaries was to the Athenians what our press is to us, but went still further. Always personal and sometimes scurrilous in its attacks, too often coarse and licentious in its tone, it yet doubtless accomplished much good in restraining political ambition, checking public corruption, and modifying the prevailing faults of society. =Aristophanes.=—The oldest comedies extant are those of Aristophanes, a citizen of Athens by birth or adoption, born about the middle of the fifth century B.C. If he was an adopted son, Athens had good reason to be proud of her protégé. His society was sought by the learned and great. He became the idol of the people, who fined such as brought libelsuits against him, and voted him an olive crown for exposing the misconduct of their rulers. Nor was his fame confined to Athens. All Greece, and Sicily too, laughed at his humorous sallies. The Persian king enjoyed his pungent satires, and regarded him as such a power in Greece that when Spartan ambassadors sought an alliance with Persia against their Athenian rivals, the king asked on which side the comic poet was arrayed; for, said he, “the party whose cause Aristophanes espouses will certainly win.” Aristophanes was loyal to the true interests of his country, and declined the flattering invitations of Dionysius to dwell in ease at Syracuse with the luminaries of his age. He longed for the glorious Athens of the past, and attacked whatever conflicted with his conservative ideas. None escaped his well-aimed shafts. He was specially severe on the Sophists, a new class of teachers at Athens, whose forte lay in chopping logic and splitting hairs, and who taught the tricks of rhetoric rather than practical morality. In his “Clouds” he derides their sharp practices and unsound system of education, striking them over the head of Socrates, the exponent of true philosophy, whose life was devoted to combating the false teachings of these very pretenders. That Socrates was merely the scape-goat is plain, for he and Aristophanes were intimate friends. When the play was first exhibited, the philosopher, who was in the audience, took it all in good part, and even rose that the people might compare him with the caricature presented, which exaggerated his eccentricities of dress and figure—his pug-nose, thick lips, shabby garments, and absent-minded stare. The chorus of changing clouds symbolized the meretricious charms of sophistry.