As to Cleon, the poet objected that his political manners were rude; and in order to set him a good example, described him as “a whale that keeps a public house and has a voice like a pig on fire!” This was in war-time--and imagine what would have happened to a playwright who produced a play in Washington, D. C., in the year 1918, describing the President of the United States in similar language! Again, Aristophanes produced a play denouncing his city for its shabby treatment of its tributary states. He produced this play while ambassadors from those states were in the audience, attending a council of the empire. For this Cleon had the poet prosecuted and fined; so in his next production Aristophanes comes back, proposing that the people shall kick out a number of rascals, including All statesmen retrenching the fees and the salaries Of theatrical bards, in revenge for the railleries, And jests, and lampoons, of this holy solemnity, Profanely pursuing their personal enmity, For having been flouted, and scoff’d, and scorn’d-- All such are admonish’d and heartily warn’d! Aristophanes loathed Euripides for having turned the ancestral heroes into weak mortals, with sentiments and whinings about their rights and wrongs. He dragged the poet down into hell, and there beat him with all the weapons he could lay hold of. He took the poet’s play of feminism, the “Lysistrata,” and turned it to farce by that most modern of devices, a strike of mothers! A play in which the women of Athens refuse to co-habit with their husbands until the husbands have ended the war with Sparta! Also Aristophanes loathed Socrates, because that philosopher taught the youths of Athens to think for themselves. To this the poet attributed the corruption of Alcibiades, the young aristocrat who had been a pupil of Socrates, and had sold out his country to the Persian king. He wrote a play called “The Clouds,” in which he represented Socrates as a cunning trickster, teaching men how to advocate any cause for money. He portrayed the philosopher sitting in a hanging basket in front of his house, performing absurdities with his pupils. It is exactly the tone of a “Saturday Evening Post” editorial, jeering at “parlor pinks,” and college professors who teach their pupils “mugwumpery.” The time came when the mob voted death to Socrates; and this was the great triumph of the funny man of reaction.