The point to be got clear is that right or wrong, this poet is altogether a propagandist; a political campaigner, full of the most bitter fury against his enemies, attacking them by name, lampooning them, ridiculing them, not scrupling even to tell vicious falsehoods about them. He wrote his plays to advocate this thesis or that thesis; he arranged his incidents to exhibit this or that aspect of the thesis; he chose his characters, either to voice his own convictions, or to make the opposite convictions absurd. Not merely do his characters make long speeches in which they set forth the poet’s ideas; at any time in the course of the action the poet will wave these characters one side, and step out in the form of the chorus and say what he thinks, arguing and pleading with the audience, scolding at them, denouncing his enemies, explaining his previous actions, discussing his present play--even going so far as to explain to the audience why they should award the prize to Aristophanes and not to somebody else! I doubt if there has ever been a bolder propagandist using the stage; I doubt if the propertied classes and the partisans of tradition ever had a more vigorous defender; and this, don’t fail to note, in a world dramatist, a “classic” of history’s greatest “art for art’s sake” period! The amazing modernness of Aristophanes is what strikes us most. There is hardly a single one of our present-day contentious questions he does not discuss at length. He has the malicious wit of the New York “Sun” in the days of Dana; he has the fun of Stephen Leacock, whose comical tales ridicule every new and sensible idea the human mind can conceive. Again, one thinks of the verses of Wallace Irwin--except that Aristophanes sincerely held his convictions, whereas Mr. Irwin’s wit appears to be directed by his newest publisher. Aristophanes was a gentleman, in the English sense of the word, and wrote for other gentlemen. Just as in England during the late war we observed the manufacturers of beer and munitions rising to power and turning the aristocracy out of their castles, so during the Peloponnesian war Aristophanes saw his cultured class dispossessed by newly rich traders. There is a scene in the “Knights” in which he denounces them; they are “mongers,” a whole succession of “mongers”--topical allusions which the audience received with roars of laughter. First came a rope-monger to govern the state, and then a mutton-monger; now there was a leather-monger--Cleon, ruler of the city, who sat in the audience and heard himself abused. Athens could go only one stage lower, said Aristophanes, and he produced an offal-monger, and recited to this person a list of his vices, which proved him fit to take charge of public affairs.